


And There Came a White Light

by horsecrazy



Series: The Originals [8]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 12:22:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 75,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4479074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horsecrazy/pseuds/horsecrazy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And the deaths of sleeping enemies shall not lie forever forgotten. 8th in an ongoing AU Originals series Klaroline</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: So Klaus gets a little gay in the flashback.
> 
> Ok, he gets a lot gay. I know this isn't some people's thang, so I'm throwing this out here now. (Although if a little homosexuality gets to you after he's murdered children, killed people for having bad blow job game, and just in general manipulated and murdered his way through scores of innocents, I'm sort of judging you a little.)
> 
> As with, well, uh, everything I write, this flashback is pretty nasty. *Covers Amanda's seventeen-year-old eyes*
> 
> The quote Klaus is turning over in his head in the very first paragraph is from War and Peace.
> 
> And with that, I leave you all to sit in shock before your screens, dumbly blinking for several disorienting moments, because this is surely the shortest author's note I've ever written.

**New Orleans, 1912**

What is wrong? What is right? What should one love and what hate? What is life for, and what am I? What is life? What is death? What is the power that controls it all? Pierre Bezuhov asked in Tolstoy's masterpiece. And to rejoin: And there was no answer to any of these questions, except the one illogical reply that in no way answered them. This reply was: 'One dies and it's all over. One dies and either finds out about everything or ceases asking.' But for one such as him there is not even this.

You see this man's heart, here in his hand. It has ceased to beat. Its owner has passed beyond. Has he achieved peace, purgatory, paradise? Does he drift in aimless mists among the masses, who shake off his presence with a brief shuddering of their shoulders and a slapping of their neck? Does he stir them with cobweb fingers to itch the nape and twitch the brows, lingering always among what he can touch but no longer impact?

Such is the great mystery of man.

He'll never solve it.

He is still occasionally shocked by this.

He wakes beside Kol in a rumpled bed and he touches his chest and he blinks his eyes very languidly, and he thinks to himself, today I am 927, and I have so much more to come, and on very damp mornings when there streams through the window the scent of sea and storm, when he is again struck by the understanding that he has left to him a million more of these sullen gray days that weigh lightly on no man's soul, he wonders how many more revolutions of the clock he truly desires to defeat.

And then the boy on the bed beside him stirs, smiles sleepily, pares his heart down to the bone beneath it, and he remembers.

Once there were two boys who wanted only an endless wood, numberless streams, incessant youth. A boy could live forever, beneath the trees of his ancestors, in pursuit of hoof and paw, bounced along on the back of a brother.

And so he gets up.

He ruffles the hair of this other boy and he cracks from his neck and his knuckles the stiffness of sleep, and he puts on a smile, the greatest mask of all.

He thinks of his sister, who has hated him with steady and faithful heart for nearly a century, of her soft hair, her sharp tone, how once she held his hand and she trusted him across a stream swift enough to scatter and drown them all, and he buttons his jacket.

He remembers his father hates him, his mother discarded him, and he gives his curls a little comb with his fingers, a slick of oil, a last glance in the looking glass.

He does not walk out into that sullen gray day for the right reasons.

To prove a father wrong, to spit in the face of Mother, the original  _whore_ , to turn the shoulder to beloved Bekah and prove at least to the world that there is no weight which may be hung about his ankles and bring him staggering to his knees- is that life?

Hasn't evolution given a man his nose to smell the flowers, his hands to feel the smooth young cheeks of a girl flush with love, his eyes to admire the death of the sun and the birth of the moon? Is a sort of thumbing of the nose true purpose, does revenge plant in his heart the true verve of all existence has to offer?

Of course not.

But he has more, you know.

This heart in his hand, for instance.

He squishes it in his palm, he drops it carelessly onto the victim's face, he licks it slowly from his fingers.

These are the little amusements. You can hang an entire century on these moments which blur together from one to the next.

And that boy, of course.

Quite a swathe Tim has cut through the French Quarter.

He turns up the collar of his greatcoat.

It doesn't quite match his suit, Elijah would be positively horrified, but it's a relic of that American Civil War he enjoyed so much, and still caught within its gray folds is the crusted blood of an exceptionally tasty Union officer who died full of musket balls in this very same coat.

It's quite warm.

It's bad form to smoke in it, cigar smoke never will persuade itself to be aired from anything, but this freshly imported Cuban El Luxardo adds such a dimension to this somber morning, to the blood in his mouth, to the piece of liver wedged between his back molars.

He blows out a sky-colored cloud.

There is a woman sagged down the wall of Lafitte's, open at the throat, gushing at the mouth, trying to guppy her final words to him, the little round marbles of her eyes locked already in that final stare, her chin red, her lips foaming.

He tilts his head.

He blows another cloud.

He walks on.

There is a smear of red farther down the wall, a splash of it in the street, another streak on the sidewalk, a puddle round the face of the man who left it all behind.

He steps gracefully over him.

He flicks the cigar.

The ash drops sizzling against the man's open eye.

Now, Tim.

The trick is to let them see you coming.

These blokes- didn't have a clue, died rather peacefully, considering, exited their bowels post-mortem, let go their bladders in the throes of death and not dread, dropped where they stood, probably had not even time for a scream.

He has potential, this pretty young thing, but he's a ways to come yet.

"Timmy," he calls out cheerfully.

He taps his cigar again.

"Oh, Timmy."

Such a silent thing, death, isn't it?

It's as if the birds themselves know.

The clouds have opened themselves against his head, washed the oil from his hair, smoothed the curls in lank ringlets across his forehead, broke themselves apart against the pavement, ricocheted themselves in a thunder of grapeshot off the bonnets of cars, filled this heavy steel air with a fusillade to shake the shutters of sleeping homes, and yet not a peep from anything that is not this sky that makes war upon the streets.

He finds the boy at the end of Bourbon St.

He smells of fear and arousal.

He has a heart in his hand, another smeared messily round his mouth.

He cries very noisily.

"I don't want this anymore," he babbles, dropping the heart, bringing his hands to his eyes, wiping the snot from his nose, tilting his arm down to catch the pink saliva bubbling against his mouth.

What a faucet grief opens inside a man.

"I don't want it  _I don't want it_!" he sobs, wiping his eyes, his nose, his mouth.

"Why?" he asks gently. "Because it's too enjoyable? Because you are used to toiling away your days under the yoke of poverty, enjoying neither minute, nor hour, day, week, month? Going always from one to the next with no hope of anything more?" He drops his voice. "Tim. Take a moment. Take a breath. What do you feel? Underneath the screaming of your conscience. Underneath the horror left over from your days as a man who wouldn't hurt a fly?" he whispers.

The boy wipes his nose.

He licks his lips.

"I like the taste of them," he confesses hoarsely, and though his brow will never show a furrow, his cheeks another day, there is suddenly the weight of an entire century upon his young, young face. "But they're  _people_."

He crushes the El Luxardo beneath his heel.

He reaches out to brush the boy's lips with his fingers.

Tim blinks.

"These," he throws his arms grandly out to either side, "are prey, Tim. They are nothing but livestock. You wouldn't get all sniffly over a slaughtered chicken, now would you?" He smiles.

He leans in very close.

"What are you doing?" the boy whispers, and pulls back just slightly.

"I missed a spot," he says, and runs his tongue across the corner of the boy's mouth, very leisurely, watching him from beneath his eyebrows.

The boy's eyes are very wide.

But he hasn't pulled himself back another centimeter.

Just listen to how riled up his little heart is.

What a boil a fresh kill sets to the hormones.

He claps his hand round the boy's shoulder. "It'll get easier, Tim. I promise."

There isn't an actor alive who could inject such sincere sympathy into his performance.

Do you see how the boy leans on him a little?

How he sags just a bit, and it is to the shoulder of this monster 'Mr. Mikaelson' he puts his own, as if this is the sturdiest of all foundations, the only refuge he will ever have at hand?

As if he is going to save the lad from himself.

* * *

Tim tries to rein himself in, of course.

Any man who has only ended up as monster and did not start off that way will make the same attempt.

But Tim-

Appetite of a growing boy, and all.

Never going to grow out of that, Timmy.

He finds it's easiest to bring the lad round by first offering to him the unsavory men of the type who broke his home and took away his mother, these alleyway creepers who have their whores without pay or permission.

They eat three of them one night, four the next.

On the following he slips one of the whores in between Tim and his victim, her throat already bleeding from his own teeth, her eyes glazed with his compulsion.

The boy switches seamlessly from thief to whore.

He feeds from the other side of the woman's neck as Tim laps her hungrily with teeth and tongue, his breath rough in his throat, his heart loud in his chest, midnight all round them, rubbish beneath their feet, the cold stiffening in his fingers and blooming in Tim's cheeks, rain in a light volley upon the streets, the tires of the automobiles hissing past, the Mississippi in a waterfall gush against the pilings of the piers-

They let go of the woman at the same time.

She falls very quietly.

He tips his head back and lets the blood run down his chin, and he watches the boy try to throttle back his breathing, to slow his heart, to tame everything that has got itself all churned to foam within him.

"When are we going to find who killed my mother?" he asks breathlessly.

Klaus licks the blood from his lips.

He smiles.

"When you're ready."

* * *

You wait until the emotions are heightened, lust let loose, control given free rein, a hot meal in the belly, death still a perfume in the nostrils, fangs still prickling with the tender enjoyment of a good kill, the tongue slicked with its layer of copper, and then you strike.

This boy is not a bad boy.

But he yields so very easily, when prodded in all the right places.

Marcel is much more contained.

Perhaps he's seen more. Perhaps he has lived for so long stifling his instincts to kill that he must let himself out gradually, carefully feeling his way, a toe to the tide pool before a belly flop into the ocean, a hand waved cautiously into the dark before a foot set through to the room.

This boy abandons himself.

It's about right.

It's the only way you truly forget, after all.

No man's throat tastes quite so satisfying if a kernel of awareness is allowed to fester in the belly of his predator. You snuff the conscience, else it takes hold of you by the bloody neck and it shakes you until you see, until what has been gingerly wrapped up in years and laid to rest in some ancient corner of your brain understands  _I did this_  I bloody  _did this_ and into hot white sun you scream, sizzling your dry Egyptian death.

So the boy buries his face, and he drinks until he is satisfied, and then for a moment he kneels, composing himself.

He waits until the boy stands.

He listens to the boy's breathing take a leap, to his heart skip a beat, to the noisy shutting of his damp lids.

He sucks the blood from the boy's bottom lip, his fangs down just enough to scrape, his fingers smoothing across the boy's shoulders, his tongue flicking over the boy's mouth.

He catches an errant drop with his thumb as he pulls back.

He pats the boy's cheek.

"Shall we?" he says, and steps off the curb in front of a car that does not dare strike him.

* * *

"What's the first century like?" Tim asks lazily from where he has reclined himself on the passenger side of the Abbot-Detroit whose driver lies sprawled in the backseat, still seeping from his throat.

He drapes one hand lazily over the wheel, lolling his head back against the upholstery. "A novelty." He takes a sip from the bottle of Geo Roe in his hand. "A hundred years is still a very long time. And there you are, still putting along, just as pretty as the day you died. About the third century is when everything begins to blur."

"So you stop remembering, after that? You couldn't say where you were in, I mean, the 1600s or something?"

"I remember. You just stop savoring it, around that point. Everything starts to flow a little differently." He takes another sip.

The sky is very clear tonight, he sees through the little pane of glass before him.

You see the stars, for instance.

Those he stopped noticing a very long time ago.

One of the few things older than him, mate. Certain freshness to them, he supposes, when you are only a boy beneath some trees, marveling at these far-away things which, unmoving, stalk still throughout your years, following the trajectory from birth to death.

But after a century or three, they too lose their shine.

"I was very afraid of you, when you first started coming to the Monteleone," Tim says quietly.

He drinks again.

He passes the bottle to the boy, who hesitates for just a moment before he puts his lips to the rim.

"And now, mate?" he asks, letting his head drop to the side to watch the boy test the liquor tentatively and then knock back a long swig.

The boy lowers the bottle.

He reaches one hand up to fidget nervously with the brim of his cap. "I still wouldn't turn my back on you."

Klaus flashes his dimples. "But there's a dead man in the back seat. Changes your perspective a bit, doesn't it?" He slides a little closer.

"Yeah," the boy says nervously, taking another long drink. He looks down at his hands. "Is Ma watching? I mean, have you ever seen anything like that?"

"No," he replies, and casually trails one finger up the inseam of the boy's trousers.

Tim twitches his leg a little, darts him a look, throws back the bottle once more, sloshes the liquid noisily round his mouth.

"The dead are busy with their damnation or their salvation, I suppose. They haven't got much time for those of us who are left. You can't tiptoe round their approval, Tim."

He nods, pressing his damp lips together, adjusting that little cap of his again, giving the bottle an anxious shake.

He listens to the liquid ricochet off the sides.

Tim's heart is so very, very quick.

He lifts the bottle smoothly from his hand.

He runs his finger a little higher.

The boy goes tight as a spring, his eyes owlishly wide, his right hand coming down to nervously squeeze the door.

He smiles, and pulls his hand back.

There is a little breath between the boy's lips, a slight relaxing of his leg, a subtle straightening of those fingers upon the door.

"Have you ever been to a whorehouse, Tim?"

"What? No. I'd have been killed. I haven't really had the time for that, anyway. Or the money."

"So you've never done anything of that sort."

He hesitates for a moment.

The cap is once more tweaked between his fingers. "I went with a girl for a while. It was very innocent, mostly chaperoned…but we had a few moments to ourselves, here and there."

"And what did she do to you, Tim?"

He gives a little cough. "Nothing, really. She let me kiss her. I, uh, I mean, that's it."

"And what did she do for you?"

The boy's throat hitches very suddenly.

His leg bounces.

He winches his fingers back down against the door. "She let me kiss her, like I said. That was it. She was a very nice girl. I'd a probably married her, if her mother hadn't found someone more suitable. You know, richer. Better connections. Ladies don't really marry porters, do they?"

"No, they don't," he says, and inches his hand onto the boy's leg. "But that's not really an issue anymore, is it? You've got a lot more ahead of you than some girl who thinks she's too good for you, Tim. You can go anywhere you like. You can have anyone you like." He runs his hand a little higher.

The boy inhales very audibly and holds it, staring at him from beneath the brim of that cap, his long lashes dipping just a bit, his mouth parting just a little.

He slides down onto the floor in front of the boy, and set his hands on Tim's knees.

He slips them up over the caps, onto the thighs, round the buttons of the boy's trousers.

What an innocent this one is, he thinks as he slips the boy's cock into his mouth and there is the sharp breath of one who has never been touched in such a way before, his hips coming instinctively up, Tim's hand seeking out the hair at the nape of his neck.

He wets the head with his tongue and slides his lips leisurely down.

There's always something entertaining to be had, in the tainting of such naïveté.

* * *

"Kol," Elijah says to him one morning as he darts briefly inside, still smeared with the night's revelry.

He stops.

Elijah reaches out to tweak his collar with a little disapproving frown.

"Nik! Inspection!" he calls up the stairs.

His brother appears in a flash, smirk on his face, paint on his hands, his shirt open at the collar, his tie swinging loosely round his neck, and smartly they line up before Elijah, who's at his jacket sleeves now, that little disapproving frown digging deeper, his lips pinching primly as Nik holds out his arms to either side and does a dramatic little spin.

"I think you missed one of my buttons, Grandfather," he offers helpfully.

"And I've made just a bloody awful mess of this whole shaving business," Nik puts in, scrubbing one paint-smudged hand across his stubble.

"Shoe lace missing. Trouser hems torn. And I left my jacket back…oh, somewhere. Who really keeps track of these things?" He smiles very broadly as Elijah gives his patented "revolting plebian" look and brushes off his hands.

"I don't believe it's too much to ask that you not embarrass me."

"Of course it is, big brother," Nik says playfully, reaching out to pinch his cheek. "Now what did you come thundering in here like a herd of bloody elephants for, Kol?"

"Someone rolled into town in that Fiat that took second place at the Indianapolis-500 last month. I stole it. You want to see how fast we can drive it through Storyville?"

Nik yanks his tie from his neck and tosses it to Elijah.

"Don't wait up, darling!"

"Yes, Mother- we'll be in late," Nik says with a flash of his dimples.

He hops up onto Nik's back and loops his arms round his neck, giving a little touch of his heels and a click of his tongue.

Nik catches him underneath the thighs and makes sure to bash his head against the door frame.

He punches the side of his head.

Nik swings round to break his spine against the wall.

"Prat."

"Tit."

Elijah sighs.

* * *

He still listens with his eyes closed and his fingers tapping and his heart sunk not in forgotten mire but pressed against his tight and aching throat.

Elijah is always smiling at him when the stage has gone silent and the applause rises round them like the firing of canons on all sides, and how very, very hopeful he always looks, this brother of his.

The boy is gone, Elijah.

Let him be, he thinks, and he stands just a little unsteadily.

Some monsters are just beyond.

Isn't that what Bekah saw, after all?

Because he sits and he listens to the lift of the sopranos and the thundering of the basses, his heart left open, his chest with the strange cracks that let down too many things, does not mean you have your brother back.

You've got to burn that sort of thing out of you. Niklaus the boy- he knows you loved him, Elijah, but there isn't any room for him among these centuries of steel cities, fragile men, nonchalant wars, Father'd have caught him in a moment, he'd have never stumbled beyond Mother with her heart in his hand and her eyes still coldly glancing away, he would not be here at your side  _now_ , brother.

He's sorry about the boy.

But you won't leave him anyway.

Will you, Elijah?

* * *

He wasn't always a monster.

He remembers this sometimes.

900 years leaves a lot of room for everything, but most especially thought, of which he is not a particular fan, because where else has it ever led him, but pathways he has neatly dodged with a careful and precise application of humor?

Does Nik love him; does Rebekah think of him; is Elijah ashamed to name him kin.

Is Mother watching.

The last is the bit which sneaks most frequently between all his little jokes.

Time is not quite the sandpaper it is presumed to be. It wears away at the years, yes, it scrapes to a harmless nub hurts which once stabbed with every breath, but an old injury is only ever made mild by layers of scar and skin.

Buried, not eradicated.

You will never smooth it flat.

He didn't have to take this magic she used to twist his bones to rubber and turn it back around, to make of it an atrocity, to smear beneath his boots all these little insects called human who were only going innocently about their time.

He knows that, Mother.

He's not Nik.

The world is not his own personal canvas, to paint in vivid red relief all the memories which will always bolt him down.

He just spent most of his life catching up. Couldn't let Nik waltz off in the arms of Bekah and Elijah, who locked in his love for good with that promise he never got, could he?

And you know, one day, he just started to like it.

It's very gradual, the tilting of your axis.

He was looking at Nik, they had a body between them, a shining sun, a smiling brother…

Perhaps he mistook the warm knot in his throat and the warmer one in his stomach which always tiptoe in on Nik's pride and root themselves in to stay for simple satisfaction in a job well done. Perhaps it all blossomed from there.

Perhaps he never liked it.

Perhaps he only ever liked the appreciation of this man who was once his brother.

Thinking: didn't he bloody tell you?

He wasn't always a monster.

He remembers this more than he likes to admit, it takes up space in his bed, when his brother is not there to fill the void, it makes a home in his throat, when he is left behind again, for some bloody adventure fit only for the elder Mikaelsons whose travels have not room for an anchor.

But not today, darling!

He strikes his match on the side of the brick and drops it into the pungent river he has dribbled down the street, watching it take hold with an angry hiss and burst forth to eat away the ladies in their combustible cotton finery.

It's a very nice fire.

* * *

He ushers in 1913 with the boy and a whore who looks like Mother.

He eats the whore.

He leaves the boy unsated on the bed, his shirt off, his trousers unbuttoned to the second buttonhole, his lean shoulders heaving with the touch of the whore's still-warm mouth on his nipples. "You didn't have to kill her," Tim breathes, looking down at the woman in a messy pile on his lap.

He rifles her bureau casually, tilting his head as he searches, knocking aside perfume bottles and powder jars, giving the drawers a good banging as he works his way through them, not a bloody letter to be had, didn't this little _tramp_ have a single saintly customer who was to lead this pretty young thing with her sunshine hair and her cheeks still white with youth into the brightness of sun and salvation-

He slams the final drawer.

"It was quite the mercy on my part, I think. There are much worse things than death, Tim." He loosens his collar.

"Like what?"

Ah.

So young, mate.

He smiles as he undoes the top buttons of his shirt.

He picks the whore up by her hair and tosses her carelessly into a corner.

His jacket sails after her.

He sets his hands on the boy's thighs, and he leans in close enough to see the thickness of lash and brow, the dusting of freckles, the grit of blood and gut in a confectioner's sugar across tongue and tooth.

"Well, this rather nasty little business you've gotten yourself mixed up in, for instance," he says with a wicked smile, and though the boy swallows very visibly, Tim does not pull away when he leans in for a rough kiss.

He slams the boy one-handed down onto the bed and straddles him.

You see, Timmy.

A moment is to be lived in.

Regret is a future emotion.

So get your hands a bit dirty now, mate- you've an eternity to pick them clean after all, haven't you?

He bites the boy's pulse until it bleeds.

* * *

It's a clear night, the air as soggy as the Mississippi, each breath a hand upon his lungs, his sweat like a bloody mollusk down the back of his neck, that one particular spot on Nik's chest which for 900 years has made the finest of pillows damp against his head.

He dangles his bare foot lazily over the side of the wharf.

"Your feet are ugly," he points out, flinging open his arms, one going up across Nik's stomach, the other thudding down onto the wood of the dock.

"They're only trying to take after your face."

"Then they'd be the most handsome feet in all of creation." He pauses for a moment, resettling his head just a little, smiling as his brother's arm comes up round his neck in a loop which is not quite a chokehold. "Are any feet handsome? They're very odd. Remember Bekah's toes? Do you know one time I told some suitor of hers that she had six of them on each foot, and she got so mad, and I told her to think of how relieved he'd be, when he discovered that they were only a little webbed, and not sprouting some deformity she might pass on to his children, and then she hit me with one of Mother's cooking pots and knocked me out bloody cold, and when I came to she was in tears because she thought she'd killed me, and then she saw the knot on my head and she realized Mother was going to kill her for marring the most precious of the Mikaelson children, and you know, I always thought she very seriously contemplated murdering me after all and then spinning some lie about how I'd run off to join Finn on the ships."

Nik is laughing softly. "Yes, I know. She made Elijah and I move you out to the horses- I think she thought perhaps we could bury you in the hay and pass it all off as an accident if you didn't wake up. We kept trying not to laugh because we'd both seen you move, and she had her arms round Elijah and kept pressing her face into his shoulder and wailing about how she'd killed you, so here I've got you by the bloody feet and Elijah's trying to hold up the front of you while she keeps throwing herself at him, and all the while she's carrying on as we're trying to be stealthy about the whole thing. We kept telling her it didn't look good, but that we thought we might be able to help you, if she were to take on the burden of our chores for the next week, so that we might devote all our attention to nursing you back to health."

He lets out a sudden roar of laughter. "What did she do when she realized you'd been yanking her round all that time?"

"She threw me into the pond out back of the village and stomped Elijah's foot so hard he had to lie and tell everyone one of the horses had done it. She nearly broke it."

"You never told me that."

"I was nearly drowned by an angry thirteen-year-old girl half my size. What would something like that do for a man's reputation? It's bloody awful, trying to carry off a lie about getting caught in a sudden storm when there's not a cloud to be seen and you smell of bloody swamp." Nik's chest pumps another final few laughs beneath his head and then goes suddenly still. "What do you think she's doing?"

"Not moping about licking her wounded testicles." He pokes Nik hard in the ribs.

"That was a hideous metaphor. Or whatever in the hell you were trying for."

"You're a hideous metaphor."

Nik smacks his head. "You forgot two of the zeros in your age."

He pokes Nik in the ribs again.

"I will throw you off this bloody wharf."

"It's no matter to me- I can actually swim now, you know."

"Are you ever going to let that go? It was an accident."

"You were jealous that on Mother's fifth try she got it utterly perfect, rather than the third, so you tried to have me murdered under the guise of one of those little swimming hole 'tragedies' that are inevitable every so often."

"You almost drowned the bloody both of us, flailing around like that! And Bekah told me just to leave you, you know."

"I know. She was mad at me. I'd just eaten one of her dolls earlier that morning."

"You  _ate_ it?"

"She bet me a very nice rock that I wouldn't."

Nik bursts out laughing again.

He likes the sound of it.

It's not often his brother laughs for the right reasons, you know.

It's not often any of them do, really.

But you've lived 900 years, you've seen the rotten corpses of plagues, the little boys of war who put down to paper a false age and rode off down the front line with their immortality intact until along came one of the balls to carry it off from beneath them, you make your own humor.

Nik.

He's tried, you know.

You don't always deserve it, but he understands about the way Mother took you and she wrung you dry of sobs, how she hollowed you out for Mikael's hate and then she left you behind to fill with nothing else, and perhaps it's arrogant of him, but he was just hoping- he knows that for some reason he did not deserve your pact, that Bekah and Elijah have knotted their fingers first round your heart and will never relinquish their hold, but he-

He's always been here.

He's patched up a lot of you, Nik.

He thought it'd mean more.

He thought one day you might come to him and offer him a hand into this "always and forever", because Nik he bloody watched you bury their  _mother_ and do you know what he did- he rooted down past his revulsion and he found inside him all the bloody admiration he's pitched down inside this black hole that is his love for you, and he strained away until it made its way back into the light, and he just kept being your brother.

He was even happy about it, after a while.

If ever he is somehow killed, put it on his bloody gravestone.

His name was Kol.

He tried.

* * *

It is still sometimes surprising, how quickly time passes for those who are not beholden to it.

1914- he just closed his bloody eyes on the fresh new year of 1913, the shine not even rubbed off it yet, and in through the curtains blasts this next year to blind him from his bed.

It's already shaping up to be quite interesting, luckily for him.

For instance, it is barely February when Nik discovers that someone else has tried to sell them out to Mikael, and so one very fine day, the sun bright through the white winter sky, the air a combination of chimney smoke and young throats, they track this little man too clever for his own good to one of his favorite haunts, and they enter the bar quite grandly if he says so himself, coats flapping about their calves, mufflers up round mouths which they unearth to offer cheerful smiles.

"Hello," Nik greets them all pleasantly.

The man blanches, and nearly falls off his stool.

"Please! Do not be afraid," Nik calls out, holding up both hands with such an expression of earnest innocence he nearly believes it himself.

"He's just kidding, of course," he adds, and winks.

Nik slaughters his way down one side of the room, he the other.

"It's such a shame when one ruins it for the whole bunch," Nik comments regretfully, dropping a spleen. "Mate?" he asks politely, pointing one red hand at the bartender.

"Would you like to go and let all your friends know what happens not only to those who try to contact our father, but entire swathes of innocents who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? And swing round the police chief's and tell him to come see me, while you're at it. I'll need to give him the official story for the papers, of course."

Such a courteous little tone, Nik.

Mother really raised you right, didn't she?

"I wish Marcel could have been here for this," he says sadly.

Nik slings one arm round his shoulders as the man runs for the door. "Ah, well. Got to get the traveling bug out of his system for a bit, you know. He's never really been anywhere else. But you know I'm always here for you, little brother." He knocks his head gently against Kol's own.

"That's true. And you did let me have the redheaded one. You know those are my favorite."

"You see? I'm always looking out for your best interests."

* * *

Tim is still quite despondent, following his best kills.

What would Ma say, he laments, head in his hands.

But mothers have no right to the judge's gavel, mate.

Leave her where she bloody  _lies_.

He yanks the boy up by his arm and presses him back against the wall of the alley around which pieces of man have been smeared like rubbish, and he tastes first the boy's warm red neck and then his nervous tongue, his hand sliding down between the boy's thighs to work him beneath his trousers until with a breath and a shudder the boy comes so hard he sags forward against his chest, breathing in great sobs.

He forces the boy to his knees.

Tim reaches for his trousers.

* * *

He talks two pretty girls and an even prettier boy into a foursome, and breaks three pieces of furniture fucking them, two more murdering them.

Nik points at him as he walks through the door into a pile of these sex-scented corpses. "You're going to get it from Elijah."

He does, but it's quite worth it.

The one vein which throbs only very infrequently in Elijah's temple is quite fascinating, actually.

Will it pop if he prods it, brother?

Apparently that isn't very funny.

Some people.

No sense of humor, is he right?

* * *

In December of 1914, he and Nik welcome Marcel back with a drink and the crushed skull of one unfortunate pickpocket who tries to rob Nik at gunpoint.

* * *

In January of 1915, Bekah waltzes in through the front door like she never walked out in the first place.

He's never seen such a look on Nik's face.

He's lost all the wind from lungs that do not need to inflate, sieved himself out all over the bloody floor, sat down on the arm of the chair nearest him as legs which have walked him through a thousand battlefields full of grapeshot and wagon splinters fail him with newborn suddenness.

Elijah goes forward with a bright smile to kiss Bekah gently on the cheek.

He drapes himself casually across Nik's chair.

"Bekah," his brother says very roughly, all of this knotted up in his throat, and he tries to stand.

He gives Nik a little push to help him to his feet.

"I like your hat, darling. How many chickens threw themselves on the altar of good taste for such a winning combination of styles? We'll call it a truly inspired meshing of are-you-kidding-me and at-least-you-didn't-pay-for-it-right."

"Shut up, Kol," she snaps, and lets her eyes scan slowly round to Nik, her chin high.

"Bekah," he says again, and his brother's voice is so fragile it puts him on his feet, hands in his pockets.

It's all right, Nik.

He's got you.

"Hello, Nik," Bekah says politely, and kicks him in the balls.

* * *

**New Orleans, 2013**

_**Is the French Quarter Headed For Complete Anarchy?: Editorial** _

_Long known for having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the entire country, New Orleans has recently baffled even jaded authorities with its sudden rash of violent crime. Leaving in its wake a string of victims attributed to the mysterious 'Vampire Killer', the French Quarter has taken a hit to its tourism that has many business owners worried for both safety and livelihood, and raised many angry questions about the competence of the NOPD, which has yet to make any headway in the 'Vampire Killer' case or recent attacks which have tentatively been linked to possible gang activity._

_A sudden increase in drive by shootings as well as the vicious burning of seemingly randomly chosen victims and the recent bombing of downtown businesses certainly beg the question of how much worse things will get before the city steps in to clean up one of the most economically valuable sections of the city, but more interesting are the stories that have begun to circulate among locals. It should come as no surprise that many who belong to this city rife with tales of voodoo and spirits cling still to some of the superstitions of old, from which have sprung rumors that perhaps the violence cannot be attributed to mankind's willingness to make war upon itself, but to creatures who have been passed down from the legends of ancestors for centuries. Sightings of these creatures range from the disturbingly detailed to the ramblings of backyard Big Foot hunters whose cousin's wife's sister saw something vaguely human-shaped and furry among the trees of a dark night, but whatever the individual believability of these stories, it cannot be denied that something ominous can be felt in the very air itself, for those waiting for the next hammer to drop._

_Whether the responsibility of man or monster, one thing is for sure- there appears to be no end in sight for the troubles that have recently inundated the French Quarter and dampened the spirits of holiday shoppers, resulting in one of the biggest slumps yet for business owners. As police scramble to stay on top of the escalating violence, the city is left to hold its breath and simply wait._

_For what?_

_Who can say, but it would appear that something wicked this way comes, New Orleans. Batten down the hatches._

* * *

Death does not wear a hood.

He does not shoulder a sickle.

This is the part that's ok.

In the longest, coldest moment of your life, that eternal second between last beat and final slumber, who wants to look up into the face of this fearsome reaper with his eyes fresh from the pit and his hands that rattle like dice against the blade, and be carried away by this thing of bone and boredom, shuttling his souls along as factories convey parts awaiting their codes.

Maybe he looks like sweet cotton-haired Nana, who held your hand as you fumbled your way from first step to new stride.

Maybe he wears the face of a friend you lost too soon, maybe he takes the form of the childhood dog snuffed out by a needle.

Maybe he is none of these.

Maybe he is just a nice man with a warm hand, and he smiles when he picks you up and he carries you gently off into forever.

But it was not supposed to be like this.

He was not supposed to be a little girl who dreamed of prom, who wore her mother's shoes, who cried when Daddy left.

Mommy…

Time-

It's going to make ants of you all, isn't it?

One day, she will not care.

One day, she's coming for you all.

"Mom," she says into a voicemail that answers too often, and then she stops.

She's never really sure what to say after this.

She loves you.

She's sorry.

She will never stop trying to be better.

"I hope you're not answering because you're on some kind of fabulous vacation, cozying up to age-appropriate but still-hot old guys who struck oil at like the age of twelve and have been building their portfolios ever since, and can afford tons of new closet space for their favorite step daughter! Love you. Bye."

She hangs up.

For just a moment, she stands jiggling the phone in her hand, and she looks out this rain-streaked window, to the people beyond, to their fragile bones, their delicate skin, their terribly tiny years worn in grooves across their cheeks and in trenches between their brows.

Here is the part where she takes a breath as she looks out over the river of all these tiny little people who one day will dry up and wither away and be washed aside by new floods.

If she still feels within herself a beating heart and pumping lungs then she has not yet been eclipsed, she is still more girl than beast.

But today she draws no breath.

She will never know eighteen, she will not precede a generation, her children will never kick her belly or lay her head to rest beneath cool mint moss, she will forever stand idly by as death puts its hand to this planet and squeezes between its fingers the souls of sleeping children.

There is so much more than two inches of plate glass between café and street.

She never meant for there to be.

She was going to have a pool, you know.

She was going to get the happy ending.

Some of these people will venture forth into the world and some of them will chase their own fairytale, and some of them will run it to ground and others will not, but what they will all have is some kind of resolution to it all, a footnote to a chapter, an epilogue to a series.

She gets no endings.

Death is a circle, after all. You never break the cycle.

But sometimes she likes to think that hope is similarly shaped.

There are monsters who write love letters.

There are mothers who gave birth to girls who grew up to be demons, who wanted to hold them away, who flung their arms wide anyway.

So maybe she no longer belongs, she thinks, and she takes that deep breath, and she flips her phone back open.

Maybe she is no longer a girl.

Maybe one day she will open her mouth and she will drop her fangs and she will drink deep of this world that was going to crash and burn anyway, that will never last as long as she, but if time annihilates all, so does hope.

You should see how it crowds out everything else in the eyes of these monsters who write love letters.

'Deacon Favrot totally wrking w/ witches. top drawer. yllw file. 3rd page in. TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE AND PAY THE PRICE. dinner 7?' she types out, and then she flips her curls.

She exits the café and she enters the street like she owns them both.

* * *

"Caroline Forbes," someone says as she is crossing Bourbon St., both hands in her pockets, head ducked against the wind.

She looks up.

Her dead heart skips one very long beat.

Marcel smiles down at her.

She squeezes her fist closed around the notes she has made on all the little various arms of this network of his she has spent her whole day studying, and for a moment, everything just bleeds out of her.

Her knees go to water, her voice trickles to a drop, all of her just this freaking  _puddle_ at his feet, nerveless, limbless, helpless.

She blinks.

"Marcel," she says frostily.

"Ah, come on, Caroline- don't be like that. Klaus and I are friends now, remember? I'm not here to hurt you."

"What about annoy me?" she asks crisply, resuming her steps as steadily as she can, relaxing her fist, straightening her shoulders, leaving him to follow along behind, jogging just to keep up.

"I'd like to buy you a drink. To make up for all our past run-ins. Which, I'd like to add, were purely business. Nothing personal."

"I'm a little more expensive than that."

"Klaus really knows how to romance a lady, doesn't he? He's never been stingy with his presents, I'll give the guy that. Now, unfortunately, I don't have any fancy jewelry or mansions in the city on hand right now, so I'm afraid anything I offer is going to fall a little short. So take pity on a guy when he's trying to apologize, and accept whatever he's got."

She sees him motion out of the corner of her eye.

His two bodyguards move to flank her.

He whisks around in front of her.

"I insist," he says, still smiling.

* * *

Oh whither does man while away his days when the sun moves not an inch through yonder clouds of fleece, when the clock hands sift no minutes, when the sky shows not a single thread of marbled storm-

Or whatever flowery nonsense Nik's books were always putting in his head.

If ever you find monotony dragging away like a chain, a cross to be born, if it bears you down into the mud and it holds you there until you choke, just ask yourselves, darlings, what would Kol do?

The dead toil away in mute eternity, hands pressed always to the glass, watching forever from afar, do they?

That little hunter brat was not the only who saw spirits clear as men.

"Peekaboo," he says to the man plowing a woman who is not his wife, reclining on the bed beside their tangled limbs with his hands behind his head.

He smiles.

The man screams.

"Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick- time's running out, mate. Isn't the missus home in twenty minutes? Hope she hasn't packed her pistol today, darling."

"Just  _leave me the fuck alone_ ," the man shrieks, putting his head into his hands.

His brother did that once, you know.

Just dropped his face right down into his palms, and cried until suddenly he couldn't.

You're not his brother.

His brother passes right through him when he sits down in a home that used to be his own and he shuts his eyes until he nearly believes that Nik is talking to him, that Bekah laughs at something he said, that Elijah cared not a bloody whit for that family who broke his own.

But the living feast; the dead live on scraps.

So excuse him his little amusements, darling.

"Beware the stare of Mary Shaw; she had no children, only her dolls. If you see her in your dreams, be sure you never, ever, scream, or she'll rip your tongue out at the seam," he whispers, and he scuttles disjointedly across the bed, curling one hand to a claw, ticking his head to the side, rolling his eyes back in his head, his tongue lolling with a hiss over his bottom lip.

The man pisses himself.

The woman launches herself with an undignified shriek from the covers.

"You have to stop doing this, Kol."

"Oh, good- you're here! Make it look like my head's spinning all the way around, would you?"

"Kol, get off the bed."

"What the fuck is your  _problem_? Are you fucking  _crazy_?" the woman is screaming as she dabs herself down with a clean sheet, the man cowering in the corner, the clock clicking on the wall, tick tick tick, he never did get rid of that bloody sound, did he-

" _Kol_ ," the little Bennett witch snaps, and she yanks him up off the bed. "You can't keep doing this to people."

"My head- look, I can twist it round pretty far on my own -Nik always said I had no bloody bones there- but if you could just make with the witchy little visions, darling," he says, and he stretches his arms out to either side. "Deliver your soul unto me!" he rasps, and he begins to foam at the mouth, fluttering his eyes, tilting his head back, smacking his lips with moist zeal, his neck muscles cording, his torso twitching.

" _Stop_ ," she snaps again, and she latches her fingers round his wrist, and she pulls him back to the Other Side with a little wrench.

He dips his face down very close to her own. "I love it when you get all pushy with me. Nik and I both like our women domineering, you know."

She rolls her eyes. "And hopelessly resistant."

"Nik got his, didn't he?"

"Just because Caroline's gone temporarily insane does not mean you're going to get the same lucky break."

He clasps his hands behind his back with a smile. "It's not temporary. It's inevitable. We Mikaelson men just have a way."

She takes off with a little huff, crossing her arms.

He keeps pace easily.

There isn't really a sky here, not for these souls who have crossed beyond, who no longer inhale the fumes of technology, who will never again breathe the ozone of summer storms.

He told you about the scraps.

Everything is a simulacrum.

Here the sky is very fixed, the ground very green, the trees with not an end in sight, not a bloody virgin to be found.

Well.

Let's not be too hasty there.

"Did the hunter ever put it to you, before you both went on to your untimely demises?"

"Excuse me?"

"Jeremy Gilbert. How was he? On a scale of you fell asleep halfway through to Kol?"

" _Excuse me_?"

"Mortal man," he bends down to hover his hand round his knee, "me." He lifts it as far above his head as he can reach. "Where did he fall? Or did you just not bother, because you knew far greater things awaited you?"

"I don't think that's any of your business."

He pokes her cheek. "You didn't. You're blushing."

"I'm  _annoyed_."

"Tell me again about how you wouldn't touch me with a ten foot pole if I were the last supernatural being in this entire dimension. I love that story. There are going to be so many tears at the ending; everyone's a sucker for the triumph of the noble man's romantic persistence."

"Show me a 'noble man' and maybe I'll be there crying right along with them."

"Well, you've got to shine me up. I know how this works- I watched all those cable channel thingies. I'm a jerk, there's a plucky montage, then I'm pretty. Or is that you? I can't remember. Perhaps we should just skip ahead to the part where I take your innocence before you die tragically of cancer."

"It wouldn't be that tragic, if you were the one sitting next to my bed, waiting for me to wake up."

"Sharp tongues and pretty faces- didn't I tell you how I feel about those? And you say you're not interested in anything between us. Anyway, I'm going to pop off and visit Nik for a little while. Want to come? Caroline is probably there."

There is a little spasm across her face.

She thinks he doesn't notice it.

That's the benefit, to a mask like this.

When you don your humor like a mantle, when you wrap it in layers all round until not a piece pokes free, there is not a soul who thinks perhaps there is something underneath, who ever bothers to delve down for the center.

"No," she says quietly.

She swallows very hard.

She blinks very quickly.

"It doesn't hurt any less, not seeing them," he says.

He doesn't know why.

He slept in a box for nearly a century; cut him a bloody break.

She looks up at him.

He's never really been sure what love is. It's not measurable. Your dead heart does not skip so many beats, your deader lungs do not stutter so many breaths, you do not tick off exactly half a dozen boxes in the 'I suppose I'll give this one a bit before I eat her' column, there is no cut-off, this number means you've just missed it, that one tells you you've surpassed it-

But when he held Genevieve Devereaux in his arms and he broke her clean in half, there was…a stirring, he supposes you could call it.

Something raised itself in his stomach and boiled his guts to sickness and for years after he held that tiny little thing so gently in his arms and he snapped it all to kindling, he sometimes felt this boiling in his guts and a thickness in his throat, and what a bullet he dodged, he thought; what did love ever do for that aborted thing which barely passed for a scrap of a story between Elijah and that Katerina peasant; what an anchor for the boys in their rifle pits, terrified of the charge as they narrated letters to sweethearts who wanted them home; look at those yellow men of the pubs who drank away their livers over this stupid error of human nature that brings even kings to their knees.

"Just go," Bonnie Bennett tells him, and a thought takes him to the divan in the parlor where Nik is drinking.

Nik.

They say the dead don't talk.

It's not exactly accurate.

For instance, he spent all of what passes for a night in a place that never changes out its sky talking to the little Bennett witch and he thought about what a nice laugh she had and how small her hand looked next to his own and what a very sharp sense of humor she has, when she is not too self-righteous to laugh with him rather than at him, and there was this smile on his face that felt rather like yours looks, when Caroline Forbes winds you up a little more round that pinky of hers, and he just thought-

He just thought perhaps you should know.

Any thoughts, Nik?

No.

You can't hear him.

He knows that.

It's just-

It's not like he can kill this one.

Maybe he doesn't even want to. And that's the whole trap right there, isn't it, mate?

You could tell him a thing or two, about getting caught up with women who will not be bent to the blade.

He sits alone on a couch with his brother beside him for a very long time.

* * *

The scraps of paper in her pocket burn so freaking  _hotly_.

She rattles the ice in her glass.

She taps her toe against the floor.

She tips her head back and she takes a nervous sip and across from her with his fingers steepled in this super creepily familiar way, Marcel smiles like he's going to eat her whole.

"Something interesting happened to a few of my people this week."

"I'm fascinated already."

He is completely unmoved. "Just took off their daylight rings and walked right out into the sun. Weirdest thing. The girl I can kinda' understand- that guy who lost his head at your party? They'd been together for about two hundred years. I sort of saw it coming. But one of the bodyguards that was with me that night? Now he was a different story. Happy guy. Comfortable with who he was. Cute girlfriend. Nice house.  _Great_ employer. Everything to live for, you know?"

"I guess sometimes you just can't tell," she says, taking another quick sip.

"Refill?" he asks politely.

"No thanks."

He tilts his palms forward where they rest on the table, and he snaps both his pointer fingers toward her, still smiling. "Funny thing about this story. Klaus missed. When we were attacked out on the terrace? He shot one of those hunters. Didn't kill him. Juuust missed his heart, by that much." He lifts his fingers and he holds them half an inch apart. "Which right there is pretty funny, because if Klaus wants to shoot you through the heart, he shoots you through the heart. I've seen him shoot a penny through the center from two hundred yards away. Now Caroline. Do you think a guy like that misses something the size of a fist maybe fifteen feet away? That's a hell of an off day."

She curls her fingers tightly around her glass, and she rocks one of her feet nervously from sole to side. "Everybody has one occasionally."

"But then we got the rest of these party crashers -waltz on into the guy's house like they own it, ruin his night, mess up his carpets- and what does he do? He works that smile -you know the one I'm talking about- and next thing I know, my girl's ripping out hearts left and right while he just sits back and let's someone else take care of all the unpleasant little details. Now, one thing you can say about Klaus -the man doesn't mind getting his hands dirty. So my question to you, Caroline, is why the sudden squeamishness?" He spreads his hands with another easy smile. "Now, no slight intended. I'm not in any way trying to downplay your extremely obvious charms, but I'm not sure I believe that Klaus has suddenly gone soft just because he has some pretty little blonde thing in his life."

She gives him her best bitch-please eyebrow and leans back in her seat, folding both arms over her frantically drumming heart. "Are you trying to tell me that you think Klaus  _purposefully_  set all this up so that he didn't have to kill anyone? Klaus Mikaelson? Who probably feasts on the hearts of puppies every morning before his ten mile grandma eatathon?"

"I'm telling you I'm pretty sure Klaus set all this up so that he didn't kill the men whose deaths mysteriously preceded the suicides of two of my people."

"Well, you're nuts," she says archly. "Are we done?" She scrapes the chair back to leave and in an instant there is a hand on its back, another on her shoulder, a surge of bile in her dry, dry throat, her breath squeezed through a pinhole, her heart sieved suddenly into her stomach.

"No," he says.

"I was taught by the best, you know, Caroline. I spent the better portion of the early 20th century watching Klaus manipulate his way through this town. And I know you never, ever take the guy at face value. Always something going on beneath the surface, am I right?"

He smiles again, he leans back, he puts his feet up on the table between them. "Here's what else I know, Caroline. Klaus does not just drop a grudge. If I'm not dead, he's not done."

"Greater good and all that. You know, uniting against a common enemy-"

"No no no no- shh. I'm going to talk right now, ok? Is that all right? Sorry- I don't mean to be rude. You just strike me as the type that can really get on a roll, when she starts talking. Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that my feelings have been slightly hurt, thinking that maybe Klaus didn't mean all those pretty things he said to me, and on top of that, may have contributed to the deaths of two people I genuinely cared about. But you know, I'm not the eye for an eye type, so don't worry, you're going to walk out of here all in one piece. I just have a thought I'd like to put out there. Just a few things for you to consider."

There is no smile on his face now, when he leans forward.

"Klaus is not your boyfriend, Caroline. This is not some high school kid who's gonna' tag along behind you all the way to prom."

"I know that," she whispers.

"Klaus and I were fairly close, back in the 1900s. Now, I'm not gonna' say it wasn't kind of a twisted thing, that friendship, if that's what you wanna' call it, but it was something. And look at us now." He looks up from beneath his eyebrows and he gives her a smile that is so eerily familiar she shrinks back just a little, the hand still on the back of her chair grazing the nape of her neck. "So you remember that I understand what you're going through, when he forgets all about you too."

* * *

"I told you to take him out back and be done with him, Tim. He's incompetent. I don't need this sort of bumbling-"

He smells Caroline's perfume just outside the front door and he flashes from his study mid-conversation, hopping down off the last tread of the stairs as she opens the door and she steps inside, unbuttoning her coat.

There is such a jump in his chest, at the sight of her.

"Hello, Caroline."

* * *

She has never seen any man beam this brightly.

You don't radiate like that, for something that will one day go away.

You don't shut your eyes and turn your face lips-first into a palm and spend so freaking  _long_ not replying for some flimsy little whim that in a mere decade will pale to nothing, that will burn hot and crash hard.

So screw this little chisel you have tried to tap into place between them, Marcel.

She is Caroline Forbes.

She went to sleep a girl, she woke up a monster, she laid a father to rest, she set down a friend not long after.

She squared her shoulders and she took a deep breath and she went on.

If there is one thing of absolute indestructibility in this almost imperishable new body of hers, it's her heart.

He takes a step, she three.

"Anything interesting today?" he asks, hands behind his back, his eyes just as bright as his smile.

She fans her notes between her fingers. "Do I ever disappoint?" she asks, and then she reaches up with these notes still fanned between her fingers, and she loops her arm around his neck, and she kisses him until he can only hang helplessly in her arms, his forehead pressed to her own.

"What was that for?" he breathes against her mouth.

"Just felt like it!" she says cheerfully, and then she slaps the notes against his chest, and she pushes him back out of reach. "Now go file these. And where's Rebekah? Because if she thinks for three seconds that she's getting away with that little stunt she pulled earlier this morning, than I have a coffin with her name on it, and I am not nearly as forgiving as you."

* * *

"Ok, so then on Friday nights he's usually at Pat O'Brien's around six…leaves at nine, walks home to his place farther down St. Peter-"

"All the way to his ugly little demise at the hands of one of Nik's twitchy little minions."

"Um, maybe you never stumbled across this particular piece of etiquette in a thousand years of wandering this planet, because it is totally a new concept and therefore completely understandable if you haven't yet heard of it, but it's actually rude to interrupt."

Rebekah leans back against one of the shelves in the cramped little storage room of The Brass Monkey and tilts her head imperiously, looking down her nose in that excessively  _freaking_ practiced way she has, but some people don't need a thousand years to cultivate head-bitch-in-charge vibes to curl your freaking toes, ok, so give her just  _one more_ let-me-just-clean-you-off-my-shoe look, she seriously  _dares_ you.

"Could you just give her the rest of your information and be done with it?" Rebekah asks the store owner standing awkwardly off to one side, glancing nervously between them both. "I'm sure she has a moustache to go home and tweeze or something."

"Ok, seriously? What are you even doing here? No one invited you. I thought you didn't have any interest in any of this."

"I was bored. You're not alleviating that."

"Well excuse  _me_!" she snaps, throwing her hands up in the air. "If I'd known 'dancing monkey' was on today's repertoire, I'd have just stayed home and staked myself."

"Caroline, please- the circus animal is a noble creature. They're hard-working and actually quite talented; don't insult them with such a comparison."

"Remind me why I thought Klaus shouldn't keep you in a box for the next gajillion years?"

"So you'd have someone with actual fashion taste to emulate."

"Just. Go. Home. I'm working."

"No. Nik's annoying."

"He's your brother! He's supposed to be annoying."

"Yes, but he's worse than usual lately. What did you do to him?" Rebekah demands suspiciously. "He goes around all day with this stupid smile on his face. He's perpetually three seconds away from leaping up and clicking his heels together. I can't provoke him at all."

"Gee, what a tragedy- it sounds like he's actually happy. You know, that state of being I used to actually get to experience, before you came into my life."

There is the chiming of the bell over the front door, a booted step on the polished floor, the sudden swelling of an entire chorus of masculine laughter as beyond this cramped little storeroom autumn exhales into the shop a sudden gust of frost.

"Uh, I'm gonna' go see to my customers, Caroline. I'll be back in a few minutes, ok?"

"Great!" she snaps as the woman slips quietly away into the front room, her human heart beating like a drum. "You scared her off. Now it's going to take me three times longer to finish up for the night, because she's going to make all these excuses to stay the hell out of here with the Original Bitch lurking."

"So eat her."

"If I eat all my informants, then they will no longer inform for me. Do you see the problem here, or do I need to draw you little stick figures?"

"Heather Riker?" one of the customers asks hesitantly.

"I see one problem." Rebekah smiles nastily.

She rolls up the sleeves of her hoodie.

There is a sudden shot out front.

The gurgling of life spilled out, the loud cracking of bone hitting wood on its way down, the clicking of hammer, the sudden swelling of an entirely different chorus, half a dozen hearts beating not in orchestral sync but wartime chaos-

Rebekah kicks the door open.

The second shot is fired into her chest.

"Oh, please," she says, and picks the man up by his throat.

She throws him ten feet across the room, into a shelf that buckles and tips forward and spills itself in a gleaming burial mound across his spine.

His revolver slides noisily across the floor to touch itself to Heather Riker's wet red head.

" _Shit_ ," one of them cries out, and with a smile, Rebekah snags him by the collar of his shirt and tosses him easily down onto the cash register, holding him in place with one hand to the back of his neck as she backhands another across the face. "Does that mean you know who I am? It's so nice to be recognized- sometimes I feel like Nik gets all the glory in this family, you know?"

She breaks his neck with a casual twist of her hand.

One of them fumbles his way on hands and knees toward the revolver resting against poor Heather Riker's mess of brain and bone, and now as his hands close around it, Caroline boots him in the chin, catches the gun as it spins up into the air, gives him one to the head, shoots the fourth through the chest.

Rebekah grabs the fifth by the heart and squeezes until he screams.

She looks the sixth square in the eye, and she crushes his friend's heart to pulp inside her palm. "Go on; off with you. Crawl back to your kennel. Tell them Rebekah and Caroline sent you."

"Or, more accurately, Caroline and Rebekah."

" _Rebekah_ and Caroline," she snaps.

* * *

He catches up to her one day in this forest with no end.

"I've got a present for you," he announces brightly, and from out behind his back he takes the head still dripping its very recent death, giving it a jaunty little swing.

"Oh my God- Kol!"

"What? It'll grow back."

* * *

Nik used to talk about this camaraderie of the battlefield which supersedes everything that man slots between himself and his fellow human race until each of these bricks forms a wall.

If a man wears his color, his intelligence, his class with inferiority, if he does not fell into lockstep, if he is just a littler darker, dafter, destitute, he is cast over this wall, and he walks always along its perimeter, peering between chinks.

And then comes the whistling of the shells.

The rattling of the guns.

The canons reduce to medieval passion men who pride themselves on their letters, who know their wine as they can name their children, who grew up rich, who gambled themselves richer, who remember none of this that sets him apart, when the brass pings itself off his helmet and is sucked away into the mud beneath his feet.

Gas makes a friend of all.

She's only had a few too many moments such as these with this girl, that's all.

She doesn't like this Caroline Forbes with her bright hair, her brighter smile, her sticky little fingers wrapped so tightly round her brother's stupid heart.

She does not tuck away in a secret little corner of her soul these brief bright moments in which there is a real smile, a genuine laugh, an honest confession.

"I miss my mother," Caroline Forbes whispers one night while she is tapping away at her phone, and then she looks up, and how abundantly clear it is that this was not supposed to come out, that perhaps she could have acknowledged this to Nik, but not Rebekah, never this original mean girl with her claws perpetually sharpened, her tongue equally pointed, her heart untouched by all.

"So do I," she whispers back.

There is something freeing in murmuring a thing that cannot be shouted.

Let her go again:

She'd like the love of one who is not a brother.

She wants a friendship that will not succumb.

She is nastiest on days when she will later cry herself away to sleep.

Perhaps she'll tell you all about them some day.

* * *

He sits on Nik's head one night, when he has drowsed off over his papers and lies with his face cheek-down in the thick of them.

It's not as funny as it used to be.

Bekah's hair he ruffles, Elijah's tie he displaces.

This next part he's not particularly proud of.

It's in Nik's studio that it happens.

He's looking at a painting, he doesn't know which one, Nik never instilled that particular fondness for beauty in him, but it's interesting, perhaps one of Nik's, perhaps another of the myriad masterpieces Nik sticky-fingered from the variety of galleries he's patronized over the centuries, but whatever its origin, it's got this strange film over it, sort of a liquid thing, and it's oddly synchronized with this nasty prickling in his eyes, and when he inhales (dead and still breathing- isn't that a trick?) it's jagged, it's wet, it burns everything it touches.

They don't have to remember him every day.

That's not what he's asking for.

The living live: it's their job.

But if he could be allocated just a small portion of their time, if they could give up just a minute here and there, and devote it to memorizing the sound of his voice, the pattern of his smile- if they could just  _preserve_ him, because he had a lot of time, he lived so many things, but that's the rub, when you are brought into this world and you are made to treasure it in its own imperfect way, when you have just acclimatized yourself to the side-by-side existence of beauty and beast and then got it all ripped out from underneath you.

Some minutes are a chain.

You drag them round like your own personal penance.

But they'll pass.

It'll all smooth out again.

Consider the alternative, after all:

An old man, a painting, some dust gathered up round them both.

That's it.

Just a whole lot of dust, mate- that's all it'll amount to one day.

Perhaps if you're very lucky, if your family will not outlive the stars, if your friends cannot outlast the planet, you'll not be reduced to a speck, you'll spotlight at a drunken family reunion, a bittersweet reminiscing, you will not be phased out by a millennium.

He pops very quietly back to the Other Side.

"Maybe you just shouldn't go," she says next to his shoulder, and he thinks for a panicked moment that he forgot to wipe his eyes, that he did not dry his cheeks.

"Maybe it's just too hard…to be dead without them," she whispers.

He leans down and he tugs at her hair with a smile.

"I've been dead a lot of times. It's not so bad," he says cheerfully, and then he puts his hands behind his back, very like Nik when he doesn't know what to do with them, whether it's ok to touch, to reach out and put his fingers to something that will not end in annihilation, and he precedes her into this forest without end. "So Jeremy Gilbert- stallion or miniature pony?"

* * *

"Come in, Caroline," he calls out distractedly as a tap sounds at his door and he catches a whiff of her perfume in the hall beyond.

"Close your eyes."

He flicks a glance up from his papers, toward the door. "What?"

"Take those two pieces of skin, with the little bits of hair on them? Now pull them down over your eyeballs."

"Very funny, love."

"Are they shut?"

He leans back in his chair and obliges, twirling a pen between the fingers of one hand, lifting the other out to one side as the door creaks cautiously open and one heeled foot edges carefully inside. "You're not sneaking Stefan in here under my nose, are you?"

"Uh, yeah- like I'd have to sneak him in. Haven't you practically been throwing yourself at him for the last couple of weeks? We are seriously going to have to work on playing hard-to-get, because you are just radiating oh-God-I-hope-he-thinks-I'm-pretty desperation."

"I'm sure there's a reason I like you, isn't there?"

"I'm cute, I can alphabetize, and, I don't know, I am like the starving kitten to your crotchety old man with a secret heart of gold?"

"I ate a kitten once, you know."

"Oh my God- don't tell me that! Can't you just, like, go on about all the villages you've pillaged and the innocents you've cut down in cold blood and the family you've spent a trillion years murdering off and on?"

He bursts out laughing.

"It's not funny!"

"I was kidding, Caroline- I don't eat animals. Too bland. I am glad to know that you'd prefer to hear of the slaughter of hundreds of men over the demise of one unfortunate house pet, though."

"Kay, stop talking, or you're going to ruin this."

"What if I switch topics?"

"No. Nope. Not a peep."

"And if I choose to ignore your demands?"

"You mean like you're doing right now? Are your eyes still shut?"

"They're shut."

"Don't you  _dare_ peek!"

"I'm not peeking!" he protests, sitting back in his chair and sprawling his legs out in front of him.

There is a loud shuffling in front of him, the sound of the filing cabinet sliding open, the banging of its closure, the clicking of her heels across the floor.

An interminable moment of silence.

"Ok. Open them," she commands.

He is still fiddling round with the pen in his right hand when he blinks the momentary haze from his eyes.

He stops.

He lowers his hand very slowly across the arm of the chair, and leaves it dangling over the edge.

She has got on some scrap of a nightgown, a thing of black lace, red satin, just enough left to the imagination to entice it, her legs crossed primly at the knee as she sits perched on his desk.

He drops his pen with a smile and leans slowly forward, lacing his hands across his knees.

"No," she says brusquely, and she brings one little heeled foot up, and she jabs it into his chest, pushing him back.

"Take off your shirt."

He steeples his fingers.

He rolls his tongue thoughtfully round his mouth. "And when comes the part where I get to start tossing round orders?"

"It doesn't," she says, and rises smoothly to her feet.

She fists a hand in his hair and she yanks his head sharply up, the other hand straying to his chest, to slide over his pectoral, to graze his nipple, to tweak it bloody  _hard_. "I told you to take off your shirt."

Truly his smile must be terrifying to behold.

He discards his shirt over the side of the chair as she releases his curls and watches him with one hand on her hip.

He spreads his hands with a smile, letting his knees loll open. "Anything else?"

"Bite your wrist, and hold it out to me."

He drops his fangs and digs into his radial artery.

He licks the excess off his lips, looking up at her from beneath his eyebrows.

" _Don't_ touch," she says, and then she brings one leg up on either side of him, wrapping her fingers round his wrist, hovering herself just half an excruciating inch above his lap, and she sets her lips to his arm, and she begins to suck, just lapping away at him with her tongue, no touch of the fang, just the caress of lips, the gentle nudging of human teeth, the little vibrations of her moans against his skin-

He drops his head back against the chair, his eyes fluttering, his mouth opening, his cock twitching.

She pricks his skin with her fangs as the wound begins to close over, and now she gives such a  _pull_ with them, and he bows his back, he digs his hands into the armrests, he squeezes his eyes tightly shut.

She pulls away, and he flutters his eyes listlessly, lolling his head against the back of the chair, watching from beneath his lashes as she leans in, her mouth red with his blood, her curls shining, her breasts just barely contained, her little hand coming up to catch the drop that rolls itself from lip to chin.

He shuts his eyes again as she presses her breasts to his chest and she dips her tongue into his mouth, rolling it round his own, coating him in his own flavor, and with a little ragged breath, he slips his hands from the armrests and he trails them up her thighs, taking satin as he goes, running his thumbs along that soft sensitivity of inner thigh-

" _No_ ," she says again, and she grabs him by the wrists once more and pins them to the chair. "I said no touching." She kisses his throat once, twice, moves down his chest with her tongue, over his tattoo, across his nipple, slithers all the way down to the waistband of his trousers.

She kisses just below his navel and kneels on the floor, pushing his legs farther apart. "Hold onto the back of the chair," she says, and then she gives him such a smile as she hooks her fingers in his belt. "You're going to need to."

* * *

She feels him tense as she unbuckles his pants, his head sinking back once more against the chair, his lips slick with his blood, her tongue, his hands going up just as she said, to grip the back until all the tendons stand out in his forearms and the wood creaks beneath his fingers.

She slides her lips down over him.

There is a crack, another shuddering of the chair beneath his hands, a deep breath, a little noise in the back of his throat, entreaty or expletive, she is not sure, and then she licks his head, and she takes him all the way in.

His heart is beating so loudly.

She drops her fangs, runs them experimentally up as she pulls away, just lightly grazing, letting them trail along the underside of him, pulls off with a little pop of her wet lips, runs her tongue around the rim, flicks it up over the head-

Now  _that_ was a bad word.

She smiles, she slips her mouth back down over him, she retracts her fangs and begins to suck in earnest.

He thrusts himself into her mouth, his breaths jagged, his thighs tense against her, his toes curling inside his socks, sweat, arousal, cologne, all of these in a cloud around her, her panties wet, her breaths short-

She slips him out of her mouth before he comes, and tucks him back inside his jeans.

"My turn," she says, and stands up.

* * *

He slithers bonelessly down off the chair and kneels in front of her.

She takes a handful of curls in her hand and now he runs his hands shakily up her thighs, kissing along after them, his thumbs hooking the waistband of her knickers, his tongue darting out to briefly taste her clit as he yanks them down, ripping the band, tearing the lace, her hand tightening in his hair, her breath hitching in her throat-

She'll try to push him away before she's finished, to maintain her authority, to keep them always on this uneven footing she has established, but he's learned a trick or two in his time, love.

He grabs her roughly by the ass.

* * *

Oh  _god_ he hits her so freaking  _right_ -

Just a few flicks of his tongue, a rough thrusting, a careful grazing of his own fangs along her flesh and she is already so freaking  _close_ -

" _Wait_ ," she breathes shakily, and then he slips his tongue back into her once more, and she arches her back, grabs his hair brutally in both hands, comes with a loud gasp against his mouth, pulsating around his tongue.

He sucks her clit until an aftershock curls her toes and rips out a few of his hairs and dissolves her knees to water.

He catches her as she buckles, and tucks a curl tenderly behind her ear.

"I'm going to bend you over this desk, and I'm going to take you until you scream, sweetheart," he whispers in her ear.

She draws blood when she kisses him. "Then why don't you do it, instead of running your mouth about it?"

* * *

He slams her down against the desk.

He jerks that flimsy little skirt up over her hips and breaks the zipper on his trousers, fumbling it down.

She cries out when he pushes into her.

He sees her hands shoot forward to grasp the edge of the desk, her head turn to the side, her breath fog the polish, her lashes float down to touch her cheek.

He thrusts again.

"Oh my  _God_ ," she hisses, pushing back with her hips, the desk groaning underneath her, the office vacillating around him, the floor uncertain whether it is to be solid ground or turbulent sea, their skin slapping, his breaths burning, her little gasps driving him up the bloody  _wall_ -

He curves himself over her, slides his hands down over her forearms to her hands, threads his fingers through her own, slams into her so hard the entire desk jumps, one of the drawers banging, all the handles rattling, the pens and the plans and the tacks echoing themselves off the walls like cannons-

He kisses her shoulder, the nape of her neck, the corner of her mouth, working himself brutally in and out of her, pressing his face to the crook of her neck, squeezing her hands so tightly in his own-

She snaps off part of the desk when she comes.

She shudders so hard around him he feels his own eyes roll back with the force of it, and now he empties his own release inside her, his mouth open against her throat as she rattles off a stream of expletives to shake the bloody rafters.

He kisses her neck again, relaxing his fingers against hers, just keeping himself pressed to her for a moment longer, both their legs shaking against one another, Caroline's breaths nearly sobs in her throat.

He slips himself out of her and does his trousers back up, pulling her nightgown gently back down over her hips, pressing a kiss to her spine as she cautiously straightens, his hands steadying her as she turns.

* * *

He is smiling so freaking  _happily_ , when he presses his sweaty forehead to her own and he leans in for another kiss, running both his hands down her face.

She smiles against his lips, and she tilts her head just slightly to kiss the bridge of his damp nose. "You're kind of a goober, for the most powerful creature in the world."

* * *

This little squad he has assembled is not entitled to all the fun.

Sometimes a man has only the weight of a gun in his pocket to make him feel truly alive.

If he has need of it, after all, it is only because there are things which knock about in the shadows that are not susceptible to his bare hands, his strength of arm, his speed of wit.

He curves his hand round the butt because he understands that all life is fraught with risk, that his bones are malleable, his legs like twigs, his head merely a melon which may be split right down to the fruit.

And what is life but a sentence, if it must not be fought for, grappled with, run down like a bloody hare?

It's raining, this evening.

His breath is white before him, his fingers tinged with the red remembrance of human cold, collar up about his ears, heels echoing on the pavement, the lights of the approaching holiday making of the street beneath him a funhouse mirror.

Thousand-year-old eyes gather so many images on the backs of their lids that to blink is to flick the slide of the projector, to superimpose one cold wet evening over another, to substitute holiday lights for the torches of peelers, the fog of an Irish midnight, the houses with their sudden thrusts from misty anonymity.

He walks with one hand in his pocket.

He smiles at the tourists he passes.

He slips from main avenue to side alley, and the sudden  _thundering_ in his chest, as he makes his way down St. Peter.

He has not run to ground a man whose name has been given to the bullet in nearly a century.

"Devon, Devon, Devon," he calls out, a little singsong he's pitched to a melody all his own, his thumb straying to the hammer, his finger slipping alongside the guard, all of him elevated, blood in his cheeks, adrenaline on his lips, just a touch of man's impatience in the hand he tightens round the butt of the revolver.

There is a rather cinematic flaring of the man's coat round his heels as he spins.

"On your knees, please," he orders with a smile, and he slips the gun from his pocket.

He likes to observe man in his final moments.

Does he plead, put up his hands, piss his trousers, crawl forward to touch his forehead to boot, to put his lips to the mud, to throw himself onto the mercy of this deified murderer who hears prayers from the mouths of the prostrate?

Or does he sew up his mouth, will he not give the satisfaction, does he wish to go out like a man?

He's seen them all, over these many centuries.

What he wants to find, among these myriad faces of the doomed, is his own final moment.

Did he weep, when he saw before him that great specter of death which should always remain a shadow and it wore the face of his father, who was never supposed to hate him?

Father put a sword to his chest, and pushed until he saw no more.

What he remembers is the strangeness that comes after death, when the corpse rises with his still-wet shirt and he reaches down to touch with fingers that are no longer attached to his hand the sealing hole in his chest, and he wonders with the clinical detachment of the deeply bereaved how on earth it bloody got there.

What he never recalls is that last conflict between boy and father.

What did he do, Mikael? How did he feel, as he put the point of this sword to the breast of his son and he struck home all the blows he must have so longed to finish?

And the boy, Niklaus? Did he reach out for that fabled bond between all father and son, and give it one last desperate tweak?

He's rolled this round a lot, you know, over the centuries.

He doesn't think the boy tried at all.

He thinks the boy shut his eyes, and prayed for Hel's swift resolution, for her black comfort, for the final calm after the taxing choice.

He remembers the choice, at least.

He wrestled with it long before that last conflict between boy and father.

To love a parent is not a preference but an instinct; to hate them is a resolution.

The boy clung to the first for all his days, but death is the final abyss, and it does not judge, and among its realms collecting souls as a storm gathers clouds, who is to know that there strides through the miasma a very inconsequential boy who made no dent, who left no mark, who loved his father for just as long as the father hated son, who has decided that love may be turned around and wielded the other way?

He levels the gun.

Have you a father, mate?

Yes?

Well, then, he's doing you a favor, now isn't he?

He squeezes the trigger.

The man's head sprays wildly.

He licks the blood from his lips.

* * *

He lingers for a very long time in front of the door before he brings his hand up to knock.

Stefan answers in a moment.

He licks his lips again.

He scrubs his fingers across the beard just showing its three-day-old strands.

He ducks his head just a little.

It makes him look smaller, a little less threatening, a tad more relatable, less monster, more man, someone who might, perhaps, be worthy of that elusive thing he grasped for just a moment in the 20s, when a man who didn't have to slung his arm round his shoulders and called him brother.

He doesn't always want to look like a predator, you know.

"Is Caroline here?"

Stefan leans his shoulder against the frame of the door. "No; she said she was heading over to your place, and probably wouldn't be back tonight."

He links his hands behind his back. "I must have just missed her."

He lingers awkwardly in the doorway.

Stefan lifts his eyebrows.

"Actually," he blurts with such unexpected volume that they both flinch back just a touch from this startling assault, "I came…to speak to you."

"You're speaking to me."

"I was wondering…if you might be interested in a drink." He looks down and he gives a little huff of a laugh, and why doesn't he just toe the carpet with his bloody boot like some bloody timid little  _child_.

There is an eternal moment of silence.

The beating of his very loud heart.

Stefan's noisy blink.

"I'm sort of a, uh, recovering alcoholic, if you haven't noticed. And if I'm not mistaken, Caroline will literally rip your head off and put it in a very hard to reach spot, if she thinks you have anything to do with me falling off the wagon again."

"I didn't mean that kind of drink, actually. I was speaking of the bourbon variety."

There is another noisy blink.

His heart, drumming even bloody harder.

"Klaus. We're, uh, we're not friends. I'm here for Caroline."

He died on the point of a sword. He's taken a thousand other thrusts from them, in his myriad years on this planet.

What you never understand is how bloody dull they are, against these barbs of the tongue.

If they could only fashion these things called words a handle for man to fix his hand, there would never again exist a battlefield blade beaten smooth by the bellies of men and the flanks of horses.

"I thought maybe we could…bury the hatchet."

"Because of Caroline."

"Because I want to."

He lifts his eyes to Stefan's.

"Because…I liked you. Because you made me feel like I wasn't out of brothers after all."

There is a little frown between Stefan's eyebrows.

The shifting of his shoulders against the frame.

"Well, I'm more of a whiskey man, actually. I'm kind of hurt you didn't remember that." He tucks his hands into his pockets. "I'm not really in the mood to go anywhere right now, tell you the truth. But the Original Hybrid shows up on my doorstep, I suppose if he really wants to come in and empty out my mini-fridge or take a crack at the bottle of Crown Royale I just picked up the other day, there's probably not a whole lot I can do about that, right?"

His smile hurts his cheeks.

* * *

He saw Mother first, when he got to this other realm with its simulacrum sky, its forever lawn, its endless woods.

When last they met, she no longer loved them as a mother, who spreads out her arms and shelters beneath them the children who brought the bombardment upon themselves.

But you let that go.

You haven't resentment for the dead anymore.

The crimes of the living are far greater.

What is the betrayal of a deceased mother when there are siblings who shed him with hardly a blink, when he will idle here under this simulacrum sky with his feet upon grass that will never crisp to autumn or wither in summer while they carry on in air stained by smog, by breath, by sweat, when they feel beneath their feet streets slicked by snow, rain, vehicle.

It's not fair, he wanted to tell her.

He never got to not be a child, after all.

But that didn't come out. Ten centuries, nine of them with his foot to the pavement, watching plagues circle round and wars reel by and ten billion graves sprung up, you'd think he'd have control of his own bloody lips.

Nik was so sad, Mother.

That wasn't what he wanted.

That's never what he wanted.

He stood there for a moment, letting this hang between them both.

And then he went away.

He didn't really mean to.

Death is always a journey you will complete alone.

It doesn't mean you want to find the destination empty.

He just needed a moment to collect himself, to take a deep breath and to paste on his smile and to don his jester's cap and bells, to find once more this monster 'Kol', who took all his blows standing because round his dead heart he'd wrapped that greatest cushion of them all, humor.

That was when the witch found him.

In the woods, with his throat full, his heart empty, his hands in his pockets.

Where else was he to put them?

He'd touched the trees and the grass and taken a bat at the sky and everything coursed past exactly the same beneath his fingers, featureless bark, featureless leaves, featureless loam, so of what precise use were these things that couldn't even touch the shoulder of a crying brother?

So he had them deep within the trousers he died in, and he turned, and he said, "We can still shag here, right?", and she never did reply to that, she said, "I'm eighteen, and I'm dead."

And then she did the same thing Nik did, and he was perhaps even more useless than the first time round.

But.

So went his life.

Shall his death suddenly reveal some new facet of value, mined from the depths where all middle children are cast?

He found out later that though he was certain he'd only left his mother minutes ago, perhaps an hour at most, the witch's death succeeded his own by nearly a month, and he almost laughed, you know.

That brutal, so very, very unfunny kind, that tears more than it heals.

Nik would grieve, he'd move on.

And how fresh it was still going to be for him.

But didn't he know that already, that life is merely a blink, death a pair of bars? The romantics call it an escape; he knows it for a sentence.

Today Mother is nowhere to be found, but the witch has gravitated back to this spot he has privately come to know as their own, a stretch of wood the same as any other, but with this sort of pull that exerts itself somehow on a part of him he probably doesn't even really have anymore, and she falls into step beside him, and he lets his shoulder subtly touch hers, and it's funny, really, because he never was shy about taking what he wanted, not even as a human, he just crooked his finger really, and the women fell about him, and what sense was there in being all cringing about it, the way Nik used to act anytime he got some little thing making her doe's eyes at him, but there's just something about these women who will not touch their knees to the ground, isn't there, brother?

"How was Caroline today?"

"Nik's shagging the hell out of her."

She rolls her eyes. "I did not need to hear that. I'm still not even sure I believe you. Caroline? With  _Klaus_?"

"My brother's very persuasive," he says, and flicks his tongue obscenely at her.

She puts her hand on his face and pushes him away.

That's the one thing that never loses texture, you know.

People: they will never be sanded bland.

"Why don't you come with me this time? I'm going to hang round for a while, right? Until they start going at it again, which shouldn't take very long, and right when Nik's about to-"

"Don't even go on."

"You never let me get to the end. Do you know how many brilliant plans you've not had the privilege of being privy to, because of this strange little tic of yours? Not letting people end their sentences, I mean."

"You're being disgusting."

"You wouldn't have me any other way."

"I wouldn't have you  _any_ way."

"You don't mean that, darling."

"I really do, Kol."

"You'd miss me if I was gone."

She levels him with a look.

He gives her a crook of his eyebrow.

They walk on.

The grass does not crunch, or sink, or perfume the sky with all the broken-off stalks he can't crush beneath his heels.

But that's all right.

Her shoulder is warm, she died in short sleeves, he can feel her skin against his own, he'll take what he can get.

You remember about the scraps.

"Do you know why I never go back to see Caroline, or Elena, or any of them?" she asks quietly, and then she takes a deep breath, and she stops. "Because I'm so  _angry_  that it was me. That it's  _always_ me, losing my Grams, my mother,  _myself_. But that's not what I want, is it? I don't want them to take my place, do I? I just wanted a little bit more." She takes another breath, and how terribly unsteady it is. "But sometimes I ask myself that question, and I'm not sure if that's really the answer. What if I really want one of them to take my place?" she whispers. "What kind of  _person_ would that make me?"

Just a person.

Better than some, worse than others.

Not unlike the rest of this strange creature called man, who murders his own child and throws himself away for a stranger.

And that's all right; he was worse than all of them put together, after all.

"Knock, knock," he says.

" _What_?"

"That's not what you say. You say, 'Who's there?' Nik taught me that."

"Are you telling me a knock knock joke?  _Now_?"

"Well right now I'm just an idiot who's spouting off random phrases because the audience participation portion of the joke is falling short." He gestures with his hand. "You can't leave a man hanging at his microphone, Bonnie."

She lets out this little thing, maybe part of a laugh, perhaps half a sob, but he'll take it, because she blinks her eyes and she begins to walk once more, and finally she relents. "Who's there?"

"Ben Hur." He gestures again.

She looks at him. "Ben Hur who?"

"Ben Hur over and give it to her doggy style!"

She stops. "I feel like it really might be worth seeing if it's possible for me to still dessicate people on this side of the veil. Did Klaus teach you that too?"

"Nik's humor is not nearly that sophisticated."

"I really hope that was sarcasm."

"I actually wish it was. Once when we were in China, it was raining, just a really soggy morning overall, and he wandered off in it for a while, and when he came back, Bekah asked him what he'd been doing, and he said, 'I was trying to catch some fog, but I mist.' And then he smiled like it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said, and that was right about when Bekah made a legitimate attempt on his life."

"So one of the oldest, worst monsters in the entire world tells bad puns."

"And drools in his sleep. And did you know that for that ball we threw, he gave Caroline a dress, and instead of having one of his minions take it round to her house, he decided he was going to deliver it himself, only he panicked after he rang the doorbell, and then he ran away? He made Bekah go with him. She told everyone."

There is not the laugh he expected in her voice, when she replies. "How can you still talk about him like that, after everything he's done? Like he's just your brother? Like you've forgiven him?"

"Why would you have forgiven your friends?"

"What?"

"Your friends. Half of them are immortal, right? Why would you have forgiven them for all the horrible things they were going to go on and do for the next several centuries? They would. They will. It doesn't matter how nicely you start out. You get bored. You get sad."

"That doesn't excuse anything."

No.

But you love them.

You always love them.

* * *

He likes the approach of winter.

It burns his lungs.

It makes him feel.

Snow is unlike anything else. The softest of flakes chaps the toughest skin, the most innocuous of drifts buries a man to his nose, an hour of a blizzard will cover a car, a day will inter a city.

Men die differently in it.

In the trenches, their blood spilt out the same color as the foam beneath them, absorbed into this cold brine of bowel and vein.

But snow-

Now there's a backdrop.

Whitest white, reddest red-

Wasn't there a fairytale about that?

Let him start again.

White snow, red hand, who is the fairest in all the land?

Oh, that's right.

Him.

He smiles.

Tim and his little team descend upon the wolves they have cornered in the ruins of Fort Macomb.

"Come on," he coaxes the final survivor. "I know you've got a few names for me."

The boy stands his ground like a man, give him that.

He pops off his head in one merciless wrench, and underhands it to Tim. "Catch, mate."

The corpse stands for a moment longer, and then it sways, it folds forward, it splatters such a nice abstract over the pale blanket beneath it.

He thanks you for the inspiration, mate.

* * *

"If Stefan is tolerant of this, what else do you think he could maybe, one day, perhaps, come to accept?" he asks one night when they are lying in bed, his head on her chest, his arm draped lazily across her waist.

"You mean you." She looks down at the top of his head for the space of three heartbeats, and then, impulsively, she leans down to kiss it. "Klaus, if you want to be boyfriends with Stefan, you're going to have to learn how to actually be a friend. Specifically, Stefan's friend. One- no cold-blooded murder. Two- no little digs about Elena, ok; he won't talk about exactly what happened, but it's over, and he's still hurting. Three- you have  _got_ to stop thinking you're funny."

"What do you mean?"

"Hello! The other day, he said, "So then all three of us walked into the bar", and you cut in with, "And the first of us says, 'I'll have a pint of blood.' And the second one says, 'I'll have one too.' The third says, 'I'll have a pint of plasma.' And the bartender replies, 'So, that'll be two Bloods and a Blood Lite?' And then you just stood there, and you stared at him like the creepy guy who has a crush on you, but instead of doing anything about it just watches all intensely from afar, and you just know that at night he sleeps with a pillow that he dressed in a pair of the underwear he stole from your gym locker and the wig he spent five hours online matching to your exact shade and style." She pauses. "You don't have a Stefan pillow, do you?"

"I don't have a Stefan pillow, love. I am, however, in possession of a shot glass and a T-shirt."

"Ok, but which picture of him did you use? Because, oh my God, trying to get something out of him that's not him pushing up his biceps and trying to convey to us how deep he is through the power of his broody eyes and his freaky hurricane-proof hair is like pulling teeth."

"Bekah and I spent a good portion of our time with him making fun of his hair, actually."

"Do you ever get the feeling it's judging you? Like seriously- gale-force magical Bonnie wind and it doesn't even bat an eye. It clearly has a mind of its own. Like maybe Stefan is the most zen, we've-all-done-shitty-things-I-don't-point-fingers-I-mean-just-look-at-how-I-haven't-eaten-Damon-yet guy ever, but his hair sees everything, and it finds everyone lacking from its little Redken for Men pedestal."

He presses his face to her chest, and laughs until he is nearly in tears.

"What?" she laughs, whacking him lightly across the head.

He tilts his head back beneath her chin and he gives her one of those dimpled smiles that is so full of all the genuine little things he has spent most of his very long life ignoring until they wilt, and she just- there isn't-

She's had many problems, but among them has never been a torpidity of the tongue. Some people struggle with words bricked between lead throat and crystallized lips, gummed shut with all the things that seal off mouths which are otherwise busy.

But she's always broken herself open and spilled herself everywhere.

She doesn't do that now.

She strokes his hair up off his forehead, and she gives him back the same smile, and this is where she sort of just stretches out and she basks, because she always thought there were moments in life that freeze and are suspended, that somehow are stretched though they immobilize clock, breath, heart, and one day, she's not going to have that anymore. One day she's going to understand about time, and how it flows forever forward, how it is the only thing in this world that will never stop when all around it engines stall and generations die out and chests pump their final failing wheeze, but you're only nineteen once, you are invincible for so long, and then time comes, and it marks you up, it dings up your insides even if it doesn't so much as bump your outsides, so for just a while longer, she's going to sit here.

He shuts his eyes as she strokes his hair, and he lets his cheek settle back down on her chest, and he makes that little sound through his nose of sleep just within reach.

She doesn't know what it is to have waited ten lifetimes to be given love by someone whose shackles are not forged of DNA.

But it must have overwhelmed him so much.

He must have forgotten what it felt like, he must have never even had it, because his heart beat so loudly, his hands shook so badly, she had to make the first move, to surge forward and take his shirt collar in her fingers and kiss him until finally one of those shaking hands found her hair and the other brushed her cheek and he just sort of fell over, pulling her down on top of him, and if she'd had to breathe she would have died, because he never broke for air.

Her story went like this:

She met a boy.

She had his children.

She died in bed beside him.

But this world is not comprised of boys.

They are not an ambition, they should never be an end goal, existence does not hinge upon what they spill inside a womb.

She's going to survive.

That's all figured out.

But to  _live_ -

That's where she fills in the blanks.

He's not going to be everything, this boy. He will not be the sun around which she revolves, burning as she orbits.

But she'll love him.

He will never need anything else, this boy.

* * *

"Do we have any pictures where Elijah's actually smiling?" Bekah asks as he squints his eyes and he carefully adds a dab of phthalo blue to the corner of his canvas.

"Or any pictures where Kol isn't making an ass out of himself in the background? What do they call it nowadays- 'photobombing'?"

He sees a little smile on her lips out of the corner of his eye. "Do you remember this one?"

He turns round to take the photo from her hand, and inside him is the dual tragedy of this pang that is grief, sharper than it ought to be, duller than he feels is fair. "Yes. That was just shortly after you'd come to New Orleans. It was on my little Kodak Autographic."

"Your hair is just bloody awful, Nik," she says, coming round to stand next to him as he studies it, her shoulder touching his, her cheek for just one sentimental moment resting upon his sleeve as they study this encapsulated history.

"Because the prat had just come up behind me and slicked it back the wrong way."

He feels her smile against his shoulder. "Better yours than mine."

He tears his eyes from the photo to cast them down on top of her head, and what a knot tenderness makes in your throat, when it is hidden away where it has no room to unfurl.

"This was just a few months before you daggered him," she says, and then she shifts her cheek against his shoulder, and she drops her voice. "Do you regret it? Knowing now that we had so little time left with him? You could have let him out, Nik. You should have."

Yes, Bekah.

Fear is every man's peak to surmount or be defeated by, and though a monster's heart shrivels where once a boy's took up far too much room, he is never not shadowed by this specter of cowardice.

He just didn't know-

He kept him in a bloody  _box_ , Rebekah.

He was always going to be there.

When last he grappled to the ground this terror of love taken away and respect snatched back and he flung open that coffin to allow his brother his own freedom to hate or to forgive, they'd have another twenty bloody lifetimes to work it all out amongst themselves.

All they had was time.

It smoothes away everything.

And so one day Kol would not hate him, one day, perhaps after a tour of every continent and a thorough besmirching of all untouched by the soot of perversion, he'd show up on his big brother's doorstep, and what he wouldn't say with his lying jester's mouth, he'd communicate through his eyes, his hands, his simple bloody  _presence_.

He'd smile.

Nik, he'd say.

The handsomest Mikaelson has returned.

Give us a kiss, darling.

"I should have," he says, and he lets her reach down to slip her fingers between his own.

She turns her face into his shoulder, this unbreakable, fragile, fragile sister of his.

"Nik," she says thickly, after a very long moment of silence. "Are you going to keep this girl?"

"What?"

"Do you love her more than me?"

* * *

It's like the bloody ass has to think about it.

She takes her face off his shoulder.

She snatches the picture from his hand.

"Never mind," she says with such brittle brightness. "It's not like I didn't already know that your taste is somewhat suspect. But there at least you two will make quite the match. She was involved with Damon Salvatore after all, which doesn't speak much for her discrimination. Or perhaps it says everything you need to know."

He is so instantly alert at this little bit of news that he forgets to call her out on her own brief little tryst with the eldest Salvatore. "What are you talking about?"

"Oh, you didn't know that? Caroline had a torrid little thing with Damon. Elena told me all about it while we were in New York."

He has put down his brush.

She watches the coming storm gather itself in his brow and sweep itself in wooden hostility down his fingers.

She smiles.

"If it makes you feel any better, it sounds like most of it wasn't consensual on poor little Caroline's part."

Off you go with that nasty little temper of yours, brother.

Do you see, Nik?

She can always turn back upon you whatever you have used to wound her.

* * *

"What happened between you and Damon?"

"Ok, you're not  _getting_ it- I don't  _care_. Don't care. Just get it to me, ok?" she is saying into her phone when he slams aside the door of his office and he snaps this into the space between them.

His entrance yanks her feet down from his desk and her ear away from her phone, and he hears so very clearly the pattering of her heart, knocking round inside her.

"I have to go," she says, and abruptly hangs up.

"What happened between you and Damon Salvatore? What did he do to you?"

She fiddles the mobile round her hand, sets it down on the desk, touches one visibly nervous hand to her forehead, to the curl that hangs down in front of it, to the speck of dust detectable only by the most anxious of eyes.

"Who told you about me and Damon?"

"I asked you a question, Caroline."

"I asked you one!" she replies sharply, those terribly perceptible nerves switching themselves from hand to voice.

"Rebekah and I were having ourselves a little chat. It just happened to pop up."

She gives the mobile a little spin with her finger.

He listens to it rattle against the wood.

"Well, I don't think it's any of your business."

"I'll rip out his throat with my bare hands, and then I'll make him watch as I eat it. What I'll move onto after that I haven't yet decided, but I can only imagine how terribly unpleasant the whole ordeal's going to be, watching yourself be consumed bit by bit like that."

"You can't do anything to him, Klaus. He's Stefan's  _brother_ ," she whispers, but there are hearts unmoved by the most touching of entreaties, love.

You bloody  _wanted_ him, didn't you, his most grotesque of layers, every dirty little nook, each festering cranny?

Well here he is, sweetheart.

"What. Did. He. Do."

"Damon and I dated. Briefly. It wasn't even really a thing, it was…me, wanting to feel like someone wanted me for once, and not Elena. And it turned out that's all it was for him, just a means to the endgame that is Elena Gilbert. Ok? Are you happy? That's the story, Klaus. It's not even a new one. Somebody didn't want Caroline Forbes- I have an entire encyclopedia full of those particular entries."

"What did he do, Caroline?"

"You know, I'm getting really tired of that question, especially when I  _just_ answered it, like, half a second ago. I know age and memory are kind of-"

He reaches the desk in one elongated step and he slams his hands down on top of it, the surface cracking, papers jumping, pens rattling, his chair giving a sudden creak as Caroline levitates herself a good half inch off the seat, her eyes with their touch of fire going wide in that fresh young face suddenly devoid of color.

He leans forward and drops his voice. "If you tell me one more lie, I will leave this instant on a plane for Mystic Falls, where I will proceed to rip Damon Salvatore's head from his shoulders, and then I will parade it, on a stick, in front of Stefan himself. I'll have it stuffed. It will grace my mantle for the next ten centuries."

A blink regains her composure. "You can't bully me."

"Do you think I'm bluffing, Caroline?"

She swallows.

"No," she whispers.

"Then tell me the whole story."

There is a very long pause.

He listens to her frightened young heart, to the air she has to scrape down past leaden tongue, to the slow working of this breath inside lungs gone nearly to stone.

She still has within her the instincts of prey, the intuitive stillness of victim.

Don't twitch, sweetheart.

He smiles humorlessly.

"It was ok at first. And then he…fed on me, and he compelled me to forget about it. I mean, I knew what he was, I was just…I was trapped. I couldn't tell anyone. I had to just…lay there and try not to scream while he did whatever he wanted, knowing that when it was all done, when he didn't have any use for me anymore, not even as an object for him to play with, and manipulate, and use, he was going to kill me. And that's why you were right," she whispers, looking down at her hands. "That's why I wouldn't go back to being a human. Because I never want to be that powerless again."

Does a heart really go to pieces, when it takes a blow from which it cannot recover?

So much is made of the breaking of this particular organ.

He knows that once damaged it is never quite the same, that with the indifference of war and the nonchalance of the reaper with his arms full of children comes a certain calcification, that there are men who, rich with circulated blood, still appear to exist without its functions, that the softest of them harden most quickly, that a mother's is easily bruised, a father's even more easily stopped up, but why his makes its way in little slivers into stomach, throat, boots, he will never understand.

You can't feel it.

Not without hand pressed to chest, carotid, jugular.

It is merely understood that it is there, that it pumps on, that it will somehow carry you through.

He goes for decades without ever noticing it.

And then she takes her little broken voice, and she thrusts it straight through him.

"Everyone just sort of…forgot. So I've tried to do the same thing. Because Stefan is my friend, and because Elena has feelings for him, and maybe I don't understand that, and I don't like it, but I still love her more than I hate him."

She's trying so hard to smile. "It's not the first time I've been overlooked. I just marathon The Bachelor, and I eat something that's going to go straight to my hips, and then I get over it. Damon is a miserable little man, who's never going to be happy, because he can't get out of his own way long enough to be a decent person and to deserve anything good. But I'm going to go on, and I'm going to make the most of things, and I  _am_  going to be happy, as often as I can. And that's how I'm going to win."

She slowly stands and makes her way round the desk with careful human strides, and then she takes his cheeks in her hands, and she turns his face toward her. "Ok?" she says quietly, stroking her thumbs along his cheekbones. "So let Damon go. He will screw over any little good thing in his life at every single freaking turn.  _That's_ his punishment."

He shuts his eyes and turns his face into her hand, nosing at her wrist, softly kissing the pulse, letting himself just breathe in her scent for a moment, and then he brings his own hands up, and he tenderly presses his forehead to hers as he pulls her palms from his cheeks.

"Well, you see, love- I'm very different from your 'friends', if you can in fact even call them that."

He smiles.

"Just imagine what would have happened to the little hunter who killed my brother, if he hadn't tragically given his life in the quest for the cure. Or the doppelganger, if I didn't want her to feel every moment of what it's like to lose a younger sibling who depended upon you for protection, for love, for something better than dying alone, believing right to the very end of their final moments that you hated them," he says with a little catch in his voice.

"People do not hurt my family, and simply walk away, Caroline."

She goes white.

* * *

She storms into his studio two days later.

He calmly adds another stroke to his canvas.

"So Stefan was just telling me about how his phone's gone missing."

"Was he now."

He tilts his head, swirls his brush round his palette after a moment of consideration. "I assume there's a reason you thought this would be of interest to me?"

"Well, let's see- one of us here is kind of a notorious pickpocket, and I'll give you a hint, because I'm sure you're going to play dumb, but it's not the one who actually  _paid_ for the Jimmy Choos she's wearing right now."

"Compelled the salesgirl into handing over completely free of charge, along with a matching handbag. I watched you 'buy' them, sweetheart."

" _Whatever_ , Klaus. She was  _really_  bitchy, ok?"

"Well, then, contrary to your earlier accusation, we have two thieves at hand. So was it Miss Scarlet in the billiards room with the candlestick, or perhaps Colonel Mustard, the library, the dagger?" He smiles to himself as he stipples a splash of green onto the corner.

"This isn't a  _joke_ , Klaus."

Well it certainly won't be very amusing to some, love.

But you can be assured he'll get quite the kick out of it.


	2. Part Two

* * *

**New Orleans, 1915**

Here is something you might like.

Nik kept a journal when he was sixteen, quite a moony thing, full of bad poetry and girls he dared not touch, and as is the right of all younger siblings, who are a pestilence (though a very handsome one, if you ask him, none of that blistery nonsense of those black European sickbeds), he dug it up from its shallow grave in the woods and he carried it with him through death and centuries, and every so often, in moments when Nik has gotten himself a handful of sand in his ladybits, he scatters about little pieces of this battered wooden record, for the amusement of all.

Well, for the amusement of him.

Bekah's return has caused quite a ripple, and so one snowy Thursday morning, with the storm piled up round the windows, Nik burrowed down into the blankets beside him, he sneaks one of the pieces of these tablets he has broken into bits and stashed round where he'll never tell into the hand Nik has poked up out of his cocoon.

He cannot recall the name of the long-dead girl whose 'limpid cornflowers orbs' (deep as Nik's soul, if you were curious) his brother is extolling, but there's a horrid rhyme, a sun in his loins, a hole in his soul, and quite enough fun for the whole family, if you ask him.

He tiptoes down the stairs to where Bekah is breaking her fast with tea and some bloke's fresh throat, still steaming with the death she shakes down into her mug.

"What did Elijah say about severed heads at the table?" He sticks his finger into Bekah's tea, tastes it with the tip of his tongue.

"He said Kol has to clean it all up, and then lay out my dress for the day. That's what little brothers are for." She catches his wrist when he darts his hand out for another taste. "If you want to keep this, commit your own murder; keep your nasty paws out of mine." She tosses his hand back in his face.

He plants an obnoxiously loud kiss on her cheek.

"You put  _spit_ all over me!"

"It's for good luck," he assures her, and he picks up the smooth white hand she keeps in her lap, very lady-like, and he licks it from wrist all the way to the tip of her middle finger. "You see? Now you're doubly charmed." He puts his hand over his eyes and stretches his other out before him, jiggling his fingers round with the fancy flourish of the mystic. "I see in your future a tall dark and handsome man, not so pretty as the first love of your life, of course, your best and youngest brother, but very nice, quite edible, lovely hair. You could make a little purse out of it. That would go very nicely with the chicken hat, wouldn't it?"

"Get  _out_ , Kol."

"It's about time Nik got up, don't you think? Why don't you go give him a nudge?" he suggests innocently, and she brightens instantly.

"I think I'll pull him out of bed by his hair this time."

Elijah slips into the room a mere second after she has vanished up the stairs.

He looks at the head.

"Bekah wanted me to have it. Don't scold her, 'Lijah; it was a nice gesture. You know she doesn't make those very often."

His brother rubs the bridge of his nose tiredly.

"And in the light of dawn, I fear you are gone, and I turn my tears on?" He hears Bekah read off, and with a very loud thump, Nik ricochets himself off a wall in his haste to make it to the doorway and the stairs beyond, his face murderous as he clatters down them, the shirt and trousers he fell asleep in so rumpled Elijah's eye twitches at the sight of them.

"Where are the rest of them, Kol?" Nik seethes, lunging across the table at his throat.

"There is no single rose, so beautiful as your toes-"

" _Stop reading it_!" he roars, turning on Bekah.

She lobs the scrap of wood over the table to him.

He fakes to Nik's left, darts right, spins himself out of Nik's fingers as Elijah mops the spillover from Bekah's breakfast companion off the table with the pocket square he slips from his jacket and unfolds with a neat little snap of his wrist. "In my loins you crest like the great Ra-" He overhands the piece to Bekah.

Nik tackles him.

"-who shall not burn so hot as my yearn-"

Elijah adjusts Bekah's place setting.

Nik rolls off him.

He scrabbles himself back onto his feet, circles left round the table as Nik pursues Bekah to the right, catches her next throw, ducks Nik arm, pauses halfway up the stairs to call out, "But for one embrace, to paint scarlet my face," and Nik yanks from the table one of its legs, toppling the whole thing on its side, head, mug, silverware, all of it in a flurry round Elijah, the table leg bashing Kol a good blow to the side of his knee as it leaves Nik's fingers and pegs him right in the cap.

Elijah catches the head.

It squeezes a very noisy drop down onto his shoe.

His jaw tightens.

"We're going to get spanked, aren't we?"

"I wouldn't worry about it, Kol. He won't be able to find enough of you to administer any corporal punishment," Nik tells him ominously.

Rebekah pats her hair back down into place, and smiles sunnily. "You're right, Elijah. I should have come back sooner."

* * *

Every vampire tries to kill himself at least once.

Elijah's turn must have come very quietly.

For fifty-two years Nik filled himself to the brim with the swords of Crusaders and the arrows of Mongols, and in 1382 Bekah plunged to her cold Aegean grave with her arms full of anchors, and he-

Well, it was 1716, he threw himself off Mount Kenya, there was a noisy splash, he forgot why he ever did it.

He remembers how the thin air touched his lungs and how close the clouds lower themselves to the shoulders of men and what a stab is the snow beneath your bare black toes, but who can say where lurks the amusement in dashing such a handsome face to pieces, he tells Nik to this day.

There are not reasons to be mined from the depths of men like him.

Remember, Nik:

He is only a fool.

But not so very inattentive a one.

Elijah's turn came very quietly, he did not go to his impermanent end vomiting seawater or eating the cold of African winters, exhaled from the tumbles of clowns, but on a Tuesday night when Nik is off with that pink-cheeked toy of his and Bekah has found her amusements in the shops of the Quarter, a hand of poker between he and Marcel, whiskey bottle straight to his lips, the elder Mikaelson stumbles into the manor with no color in his face, his shirt collar misaligned, his suit jacket undone.

"What's got your knickers up your cock hole?" he asks, and Marcel sits back from the table, shaking his head.

"Sorry; I get salty when I drink." He watches Elijah from beneath his brows.

Not even a scold for this mouth desperate for a bit of lye to burn from his tongue his lowbrow language?

"There have been some recent…difficulties between some vampires and one of the local covens."

"Heard about that," Marcel puts in, reaching across the table for the bottle. He takes a long drink. "Actually been approached a few times myself, by vamps who think the witches ought to be 'put in their place'. Not really my kind of scene. Sure you boys understand."

"And that's what's got you all disheveled, brother?" he asks, tossing down a flush.

Marcel flicks the cards in irritation, and reaches for the cigar smoldering in the tray midway between them.

He blows out a long gray breath.

"It's been a long night," Elijah says without looking at either of them, and then he makes his way shakily up the stairs.

Marcel blows another cloud.

He takes the cigar from his fingers and gives it a thoughtful puff.

"What's he care about something like that?" Marcel asks, sizing up the cards in his hand with a squint of his eyes.

"He doesn't." He holds the smoke in his mouth, leaks a few thin tendrils of it from his nostrils. "You know where Nik was headed?"

"Fight on tonight, wasn't there?" Marcel squints harder.

"Just throw it down. You haven't got a hand, mate."

"You don't know that."

"It's a safe conjecture. You've got the same look as Nik when someone mistakes a Renoir for a Gaugin."

"Does that really matter to him?"

"He once ate someone for insisting that  _Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette_  was one of Gaugin's Martinique works. He takes ignorance very seriously. Also any praise of Proust. He threw  _À la recherche du temps perdu_  through a window the other day. Took some man's head right off his shoulders. Anyway. Was there a fight?" He leans back in his chair just far enough to put his feet up on the table.

"That's what he told me. Sounded like he was going to take Tim to it."

He huffs a spiral from the corner of his smirk. "Want to go piss him off?"

"I try to avoid that with Klaus, actually. This head's too pretty, you know what I mean?"

"I do. I have the same dilemma, actually. Defend at all means this monument to beauty? Or give Nik a poke which will fuel entire centuries of joy whenever I look back upon it?" He stubs out the cigar. "Put down your cards, darling. This game's boring anyway. I could have put a wig on a potato and got a more challenging round out of him. So unless you want to start betting clothes, I don't see why I should care where this is going."

Marcel throws down his cards. "I've seen what happens when you Mikaelsons talk a guy out of his clothes."

"I haven't heard any complaints put up by Tim."

"That kid's going to have a hell of a rude awakening one day. Nice kid. Dumb as hell."

"Not dumb; Nik doesn't like those. Inexperienced; very innocent. Now those he does like. They're fun to bring down. Not to mention, society hates homosexuality more than it hates you. Imagine the shame he has to swallow down with his cum."

Marcel skitters the cards beneath his hands, slides them over top of one another, fans them out with a little breath through his nose and a flicker of his lids. "You're a twisted bunch, Mikaelson."

"Yes. But not for that. You know why Tim hates himself?" He swings his feet down off the table and he leans forward with both hands clasped between his knees. "It's not because of what Nik's done to him. It's because he's supposed to. You dress him in a uniform, put a gun in his hand and the same pile of victims at his feet, and stately grandmas with bibles to their chests will clasp his hand with stars in their eyes. Nobody cares about murder. But a dick up the ass- now there's a true crime. Nik sees the humor in that, is all."

"It's not funny."

Neither is the skin your god dropped you into when your mother opened her legs to your father, mate.

But quite the laugh the government and its people have given themselves over your rights, haven't they?

Here is a secret.

He has plumbed the depths of human hearts and he has unraveled the bowels of monster's guts in every which way you can think of, literally, metaphorically, allegorically, and though you will not believe it, Marcel Gerard, a skin is only a skin.

There is nothing different to be had in this skein of entrails and instinct.

You'll see, darling.

"Let's go," he says, scraping back his chair and swooping down for one final nip from the whiskey. "I haven't irritated Nik in nearly twenty-four hours. A drought like that's going to dry me right up. I'll end up like dear Grandpa Mikaelson, upstairs right now arranging all his suits alphabetically by brand name. It calms his nerves, you know."

* * *

On Tuesdays Lafitte's is compelled free of humans, the door barred against late customers, the tables put off to one side, a bit of chalk etched down for the combatants, and the first of the challengers put forth with nervous breaths of beer and blood.

Tim leans back against one of the tables beside him, arms crossed, Donegal cap balanced on the thigh of his left leg, his eyes on the two men circling one another within the circle of chalk.

"What do you say, mate?" he asks, putting his lips to the boy's ear. "Going to give it a go?"

Inside the circle the fight begins very gradually, a careful tiptoeing round the opponent, a testing of his speed, a probe of the strength, and then in a blur they suddenly come together, one of the men's fangs down, his veins out to his temples, the other with the precise form of a boxer, his uppercut dislocating jaw, his hook shattering cheekbone, pieces of bone scattering like teeth across the floor, the cluster of watching monsters sending up a great cheer, the scent of sweat high, the rushing of blood higher-

Tim watches carefully.

The boxer gets his arm round the other's throat, breaks him down the middle with a twist of his torso, lets him flop loosely at his feet.

He kicks the loser from the ring.

There are a few jibes, a flash of green from hand to hand, another challenger oiled up with nerves, his shoulders shining under the lights.

He thrusts out a front kick, has his right leg sheared off at the knee, watches his heart sail off into the crowd with the last instinctive blinks of his nervous system.

He sends up a gout of blood from his chest when he falls.

The crowd lets loose another hearty roar.

An attendant rolls off the victim and pushes forth another, a mammoth thing with tattoos round his forearms and a spot of bald round his hairline, his trousers just barely keeping at bay the layer of paunch over a stomach like iron.

The boxer claps his hands to both the man's ears, gives him a crack to the nose, staggers back at a blow to the temple that nearly takes off his bloody head.

Someone crosses the chalk line and is pulled to pieces by the crowd.

Tim ducks a bit of spleen.

There is no finesse to the new contender's movements, but what he hits breaks very messily, little white tongues of the boxer's shin and elbow and chin bristling all round him, and now it has become a mere game of keep away, the boxer ducking rather than striking, fleeing rather than advancing, and when at last he is cornered by this behemoth with his scar-knotted shoulders, the boxer edges his foot over the line of chalk, into defeat, and into the heart of the crowd he is yanked with a scream, and taken down to the skeleton.

Tim shrugs off his jacket.

He grabs his cap from his thigh and flips it back over his shoulder.

He catches it with a smile.

That boy.

Going to go places, he is.

Tim's a tall thing, got a few inches on him, good pair of shoulders, forearms of a farm boy, but he is half the width of this behemoth, and what he rolls up his sleeves to reveal look like the branches of blights in comparison.

He cracks his neck.

He steps over the circle.

One thing about him you may not know, mate.

He learned from the best.

He springs right up onto the man's shoulders and he gropes up above his head to take hold of one of the wooden ceiling beams, and then with a brutal twist of the legs he's got wrapped round the man's neck, he sends his adversary into a pile on the floor.

There is a brief pause, the gathering of the crowd's stunned breath, the shuffling of money which should never have changed hands on behalf of this scrawny little scrap of a thing, and then Tim drops, the man is rolled off, the next rival steps up.

Tim blocks his sidekick, punches him in the groin, breaks his neck.

He wipes the sweat from his brow.

There is a tilting of the axis now in this flurry of paper, the bets beginning to even out, to gather weight on the side of this boy who is such a pretty young thing, not even a decade to his name, hardly a murder in his eyes, and through another opponent Tim makes his way, exchanging three blows with the man before he gets his teeth into the man's carotid and rips until it sprays.

The cheers have begun to gather steam once more.

He sips from a glass of bourbon someone has left unattended.

Tim dislocates a shoulder, puts his arm up to the elbow in the challenger's gut, tosses him screaming from the circle.

Into the ring goes a tiny little thing, hardly fourteen by the look of him, cap low over his eyes, vest sagging round the sides, trousers with barely a handhold on his hips, cheeks smudged with the prepubescent dirt of a beard not yet spread to his lip, and someone in the crowd laughs.

The boy breaks Tim over his knee and hurls him across the room.

There is another hush from the crowd.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," someone says, and strips themselves down to their suspenders.

He kneels beside Tim and taps the boy's cheek as he begins to come round, smiling up at this precocious young thing circling the chalk with his opponent half a head taller. "What the hell happened?" Tim murmurs blearily.

He slips his hands under the lad's arms and hauls him to his feet. "You had a good run, mate," he says, putting the Donegal cap to rights on Tim's head. "Have a drink." He puts the stolen bourbon in Tim's hand.

The boy in the ring backhands the head from his challenger, grabs his heart on the way down, throws it nonchalantly to one side.

Klaus begins to laugh.

Tim takes a swig of his bourbon and gives him a look from the corner of his eye, wrinkling up his brow. "What's funny?"

"You'll see," he says, smiling to split his face.

"Nik!" his brother crows from behind him, and something hits his back with the force of a cannonball.

He hooks his hands under Kol's thighs, and bounces him playfully. "Are you putting on weight, little brother?"

"Stop- you noticed. Yes, I wanted an ass in a six hoop. All the prettiest girls are wearing them these days, you know."

"They are not; fashion's got its hands on those horrible hobble skirts."

"They're wearing them in Paris."

"They are not."

"Why do you always have to ruin everything for me, Nik? By the way, I came here to piss you off, but this is far more entertaining." He points to the boy in the ring. "Oh, and nice seeing you again, Tim. Ready to hop beds yet? Nik's a bit of a prude; I have much more to teach you."

"Uh…no thanks."

Marcel emerges suddenly from the crowd, his hands full of mugs. "The finest alcohol you can steal this side of the Quarter, boys."

Kol puts a hand over his eyes and snatches the first glass from Marcel.

He steals a pull from it as Kol brings it back to his lips. "You can't do that, Nik. What would Elijah say?"

"That sharing a glass is the worst of the seven sins, and perhaps lock me in a closet with you for a week as punishment?"

"But how would you survive such joy?"

"One of us wouldn't."

The boy in the ring flashes from one edge to the other, throat in each hand, and he knocks the skulls of these challengers together hard enough to split them to the brain, and hurls them into the stack of tables piled off to one side.

"Good show!" Kol hollers, looping both arms round Klaus' neck and clapping right in front of his nose. "Now tell them they've been very bad and give them a paddling."

The boy dismantles his next adversary.

"Excellent; excellent, darling. Now with this one, I want you to put your boot on his head and make him call you 'daddy'."

The boy shatters a kneecap, twists an arm clockwise until it splits along the seam, rips loose the larynx from the throat.

"What do I say if I'm one of those idiots in the opera box next to ours? The ones with their titles up their asses?" Kol asks him quietly.

"Capital."

"Capital! Now, step on him with your heels; he likes that. Yes. Grind it in a little bit, there you go. He has been very naughty, hasn't he? Now off with your belt, and give him a smacking with it."

"Shut  _up_ , Kol!" Bekah snaps, and hurls the hat on her head into the crowd.

Kol catches it and sets it crookedly on his own head. "Bekah!" he gasps dramatically. "Is that you?"

"Why don't you step up here next, you little ass?" she yells.

"Oh, no, not me- I'm a pacifist."

"Are you a fuckin' poofter? You afraid to fight her?" someone up front asks over his shoulder, twisting round with his hands in his pockets. "Why don't I show you how a real man would handle it?"

"Don't talk to my brother like that," Bekah demands, and decapitates the man with the boot she bends down to unlace in a blur.

"That's your sister?" Marcel asks, taking a drink of his whiskey.

"Don't even think about it, mate. She'll eat you alive."

"Of course she won't. She's lovely," Bekah interjects with a smile, out of that circle and across the room before this even entirely leaves his lips. "I'm done here, Nik. Take me home now."

"Your highness," Kol says gravely, and sweeps off his hat.

" _You_ ," she snaps, and pushes him off onto the floor. "I'm going to cut you into pieces and sell you to a farm as pig slop."

"Just lovely, Marcel," he calls up from the floor. "There is no daisy so delicate and wilting as our beloved sister. Once she actually swooned at a stiff breeze."

"Maybe if I was downwind of  _you_."

Tim has got his jacket slung over his arm, his eyes darting between siblings, adam's apple working, the sweat of his fight breaking out once more on his forehead.

"Yes," he says reassuringly, clapping the boy on the shoulder. "They're quite the menagerie. Shall we?"

"I said you're taking me home, Nik."

"I'm sure you're quite capable of finding your way back to the house, Rebekah. Tim and I have prior engagements."

"Yes, I'm sure you have completely pressing matters to attend." She gives Tim a withering look.

"Don't be nasty, sister. It's Tim's dinnertime."

"And what is he eating?" she asks, crossing her arms and cocking one eyebrow.

"Now that's just crude, Bekah, and I'm sorry to say, but I do not approve of what I think you're suggesting," Kol puts in, dusting off his hands as he stands. "Nik has nothing but the purest of intentions, you know that."

"Right. Well, someone escort me back to the house. I don't want to walk alone."

"You've broken half the things that are lurking in the shadows," Kol points out.

"I don't care about  _them_ \- it's boring. I want someone to talk to. I haven't seen any of you in decades."

"Well, whose fault is that?"

" _Yours_ , you idiot!" she snaps. "If you'd stop eating everyone I like, then maybe I wouldn't have to ignore your stupid, inconsiderate ass face for a century! Do you ever think about that? Or is there just a bunch of whistling in your head?"

"That was a good one, Nik. Rejoinder?"

"Shut up, Kol. You're almost as annoying and stupid as Nik."

"You see, Nik? She does appreciate you."

Marcel swoops in with a smile. "I would be more than happy to escort you, Miss Mikaelson. The southern gentility isn't dead in all of us, you know."

"Thank you," she tells him with a bright smile, and wraps her arm round the elbow he offers her.

She hits him and Kol both over the head as she flounces past them. "What was hard about that, you idiots?"

* * *

"How long does it take, to not care anymore?" Tim asks him one night, his trousers pulled up lazily round his hips, buttons undone, his chest still shirtless, the ceiling fan whipping from their hair all the wet little droplets of the past hour.

"About what?"

The boy sounds very tired. "Any of this."

He pauses for a very long time.

What you want to know, of course, is where the conscience ends, the bloodlust reigns supreme, when does society gives itself a knock about the backside with the door, will there ever come a day when a step is not weighted, when the centuries dust themselves from your shoulders with barely a thought for this great insurrection, that slain ruler, is there a calcification of the heart that lets no brother, mother, lover through to the meat?

Well, now.

What kind of monster would he be, if he answered that?

He sucks on the boy's ear.

He rolls them both over in the sheets, and he runs one of his fangs up the boy's spine.

* * *

"Nik," Bekah says to him one day, without looking up from the book in her hand.

"Hmm?" He lifts his head from his sketches.

She turns a page.

She tucks her hair neatly behind her ear.

"I missed you."

He jogs his legs beneath his sketchpad, his charcoal forgotten in his fingers.

He has always saved his softest of smiles for her. "I missed you too, Bekah."

"Of course you did." She tips her head haughtily and turns another page.

"And nothing more so than your modesty, which as always is the shining example upon which we should all model ourselves."

"Don't talk like that; you sound like Kol when you're being a sarcastic ass."

He purses his lips and looks down with a little smile, shading the corner of his sketch. "Did you hear about the man who lost his left side? He's all right now."

"Go back to being Kol."

* * *

Elijah pops in as Bekah and Nik are arguing over the top of him one night, his head in Bekah's lap, his feet up on the arm of the couch they are sharing, his fingers carefully teasing free the thread she does not notice him unraveling while she berates Nik over whatever it is her bloomers are puckered over.

"Kol, stop ruining your sister's dress. Niklaus, I have business elsewhere for a while; I expect you to remember that Father is still lurking, and to keep your theatrics contained."

"No pudding for dinner." He turns his head to smile up at Bekah. "Especially for you, you little tart. Who sits round with men in company with their skirt in this kind of state?" He holds up the handful of thread he has unspooled from her dress.

"What are you doing, you little prat?" she screeches, and rolls him off her lap. "Elijah! I had this specifically tailored for me in Paris -it's  _one of a bloody kind_ \- I even ate the tailor afterward, to be sure they couldn't duplicate the design and pass it along to one of those cheap knockoff shops, and now he's gone and bloody  _ruined_ it like the disrespectful little child that he is. You're the  _plague_ , Kol Mikaelson."

"So box his ears and be done with it,  _Mother_ ," Nik snaps. "What do you mean, you have business elsewhere? What could you possibly have going on that I am not aware of?" he asks Elijah.

"Yes, Elijah, didn't you know you're not allowed to have a life outside of Nik?" Bekah points out.

"Would you shut up?" he snaps. "Do you know what it was around here, before you showed up? Quiet."

"I know that's not true, Nik, unless you stuffed Kol in a trunk and rolled him into the Mississippi, so stop lying to my face, or I'll cut your tongue out with my nails."

"Today I nailed inverted crosses round one of the churches."

"That's nice," Bekah says with exaggerated sweetness. "Nobody cares."

"Then I set it on fire."

"You do that with  _everything_ , Kol! If you come to me and you say, "I  _didn't_ light something on fire today," then maybe I might bat a lash. Till then, would you please shut your mouth before I do it for you? I'm trying to have an argument with Nik."

"And I'm trying to have a bloody  _adult_ conversation with Elijah, so if the two of you don't want to join Finn, perhaps you could do us all the great favor of letting your intellectual superiors carry on like grown-ups, hmm?"

"You aren't the intellectual superior of a trained monkey, Nik! You just read a lot of books and then repeat whatever it is that comes out of them and think we should all bow down and lick your boots because you regurgitated some nonsense about the psychological implications of a smear of paint, which, by the way,  _is just a smear of paint_!"

"Elijah!" Nik snaps. "Do you see what I'll have to put up with, while you're away?"

" _You_? I've got testosterone coming out my bloody  _ears_. If I could have been guaranteed just one sister, I'd have drowned you all at birth."

"But what if she was prettier than you?" Kol asks, slipping his hands behind his head and crossing his legs at the ankle.

"She wouldn't be. And why the hell are you still lying on the floor?"

"If I were less chivalrous, I'd say it's because I can see up your skirt and can report that Bekah is wearing pink underclothes."

She tries to stomp his neck.

He rolls himself across the floor as she clumps after him, holding her skirt out of the way of the delicate slippered feet she tries to put through his spine.

"Everyone  _stop_!" Elijah roars, and his next revolution halts itself halfway through and Bekah drops her skirts with a startled rustle, and even Nik with his gloating little smirk flattens out his lips and tries to make of himself something as beatific as the ceilings of chapels, his head down, his hands behind his back.

"I'll be back in a few days," Elijah says as calmly as though he never lifted his voice at all, straightening his ascot. "Please leave a house for me to come home to. Kol."

He disappears up the stairs.

Nik blinks.

"He's very weird."

"Says the idiot rolling around on the floor," Rebekah snaps, and kicks him in the ribs.

* * *

He is not sure which gets more stares: the Negro in the midst of his white superiors, or Rebekah in her trousers and vest.

In the most monstrous corners of the French Quarter, where man does not stretch his shadow, they are awarded barely a blink.

Isn't that something.

From the mouths of sewing circles arcs society's indignation at the audacity of slaves, to lie oozing at his feet, and yet in the eyes of murderers there is only a man, whose skin has not a shade.

Do you know, when his own mother cast him out, it was to the shades of beasts and fiends he turned, to grow up in their shadows and to eventually mature beyond their teachings, to walk forth and birth his own menagerie of the damned, from which he learned that a child is indeed expendable, just as Mother taught him once a very long time ago?

You are not a Negro anymore, Marcel Gerard, just as he is no longer a boy.

Remember that.

The French Quarter is one long puddle of streetlamps, Bekah's skin gold with it, Kol's hair polished with it, the two of them loping ahead like children, hands clasped, Bekah putting an elbow to his head when he misbehaves, Kol retaliating with a verbal jab that cuts nearly as deep, Marcel laughing, he smiling up the street after them both.

"They always like this?"

"They're quite close, actually. When Bekah is not trying to murder him. You may have noticed out sister is a bit lofty; Kol takes that out of her, whether with laughter or exasperation, it doesn't matter to him."

"So where has she been all this time?"

He listens to his heels clicking against the pavement.

A streetlight flickers above them, and plunges a square of Bourbon St. into anonymity.

"We take our little breaks from one another, from time to time over the centuries."

"So how long was this one?"

He looks ahead to the bouncing of his sister's hair, to the smiling profile of his brother, to this old man and this older woman with their fingers in playful knots, Kol ruffling her hair, she jabbing his ribs.

"A hundred years. It was my fault," he says woodenly.

He doesn't often admit that.

Mother hurt him, Father hunted him, etc. etc., from the shoulders of a boy he sprouted the wings of a demon because what choice has any man but to embrace metamorphoses, to shoulder his change lest he be flattened beneath it, and what is an eternity spent hobbling round half-realized, but Bekah-

Bekah he failed.

He does that a lot.

And she just- she keeps working her way back round to him, mate. There is no atrocity too hideous. She will impale herself on him, as all things do, and he will tear her to the bone because her hair is the color of Mother's, and though he will feel a stab in his gut you would not believe of a monster like him, he will not go crawling on hands and knees to his amends.

He has only his pride sometimes, you know.

What you don't know and will never suspect because what glimpses you are awarded are quickly washed off in blood and bone is that what he encouraged Elijah to cast off as a fault unnecessary in creatures with better things to do than to love what will pass from their hands, as all things do-

He hasn't even done away with it himself.

He sleeps beside his youngest brother because there once was one younger still who did not survive his tiny human years, and he takes from his sister the hands of her lovers because there will come a day and a companion to lure her far away, and though an ocean is not a barrier, a continent not a hurdle, there is no surpassing this curse of the looked-over and the left-behind.

Does it hurt, you will want to know.

Is a decade a balm, a century an anesthetic?

He'd like to say he loves them less.

He'd like to say that each day indifference noses its needle a bit more into his heart, and plies its drug to his blood, that there are mornings when he hears Kol's breathing stop beside him and he does not remember a boy who only wanted to see the moon coax men into beasts, that Bekah could leave, Elijah write him off, that he'd really suffer not a pang, good riddance to the lot of them-

He'd like to say that.

"Anyway," he continues. "She holds quite a grudge, Bekah."

"A hundred years- I'll say. What brought that on?"

"Nik!" Kol hollers back at him, turning with Bekah on his arm, top hat on his head, cane in his hand.

"Where the hell did you get those?"

"He nipped up a street to pinch it from some man he said you go to the opera with. Where'd you put your head?"

"I know where!" Kol sings out, saluting them with his cane. "Nik, did you remember to get Elijah a welcome-home present? He said he'd be back tomorrow."

"I'm not getting him a bloody welcome-home present; if he hadn't left in the first place, he wouldn't need to be welcomed back at all."

Kol cracks his cane joyfully against the pavement. "You make it so easy to hold onto my spot of most cherished brother, Nik. Want to know what I got him?"

"No."

"Two heads. And I put them on pikes; sort of a nod to bygone eras. You know how he likes to reminisce. Isn't that considerate of me?"

"If you were truly considerate, you would have got him three, like I did," Bekah puts in.

"Did you?"

"No, but this morning I ate three women, and I thought of him the whole time."

"What did you have?"

"Three brunettes; two of them were too skinny, but the third was very nice, quite round. I saved her for dessert."

"Oh, look, they must be preparing for my arrival," Kol says as ahead of them a commotion suddenly breaks out. "It's a bit exhausting, this popularity, but I shall go to meet my subjects like any responsible monarch. Bekah, do you think they'll kiss my toes this time? Nik, would you unlace these for me? There's a reason I have people for this sort of thing. Bekah, I'll just climb up on your shoulders-"

"You'll get both your legs broken and put in a very hard to reach spot." She swats him across the head.

The commotion peels apart to reveal a woman being bandied about between vampires, stumbling from one to the next with her throat streaming, Latin falling from her lips in a slur, boisterous laughter all round her.

"This is the second time this week," Marcel says quietly beside him. "They pick up the young witches who panic and can't work up anything more than a minor headache at best, pass them around for a bit, then kill them."

"You mean they're not gathered for me. This is an outrage."

"What's an outrage is that hat, Kol. You look ridiculous."

"You're only jealous, Bekah."

The woman falls.

Someone kicks her in the face.

He sniffs round for her blood, but it's all ground into the pavement now, a paste of tar and gore, hardly appetizing at all, and with a glance to his watch, he looses a whistle at his two younger siblings. "Come on, you two. Let's turn round."

"Don't you want to watch?" Kol asks.

"I don't particularly care. She's nearly done anyway. There's a vaudeville act opening at the Orpheum tonight that I want to go see."

"Anything I'm going to care about?" Bekah wants to know.

"I don't think there's a mirror, so probably not, darling. If it makes you feel any better, you can spend the whole performance looking at my face."

"Shut up, Kol."

The woman lets loose a scream to raise the hair on the arms of men, and goes silent.

"So. The Orpheum?"

* * *

Elijah returns with a bit of color in his face.

"Successful trip, brother?"

"It was…reassuring, Niklaus."

"Do you know what else is reassuring? Sharing your burdens among your family."

There is a brief smile across Elijah's lips. "It's nothing important. Anything to share with me, in light of my absence?" He takes a seat on a sofa in the parlor and neatly crosses his legs, leaning back with one hand dangling over the side of the armrest, the other at his tie.

"Let's see. Kol managed to set on fire a very prominent senator in town for a visit, Bekah is utterly unrepentant in her demands, and appears to have her eye on Marcel, and as for myself, I had a very nice 1898 blonde and rescued your suits from the overwhelming stench of severed head. You know that just never comes out."

Elijah lifts his eyebrow.

"Kol made you two impaled heads as a welcome-home present."

"That was thoughtful of him." He smoothes his fingers down the last little crease in his tie.

"Well, you know our brother."

"Yes. I'm lucky I didn't receive three."

"Bekah scolded him about that, by the way. She thought he was being stingy. She ate three brunettes and thought of you the whole time." He smiles. "How much you must have longed for us, throughout this past week."

"There was not a moment I did not think of you," Elijah says with another little smile, just gently mocking enough to show that he is not so very insincere after all. "Have you eaten yet?"

"No; dinner together? Just the two of us? I advise we avoid the French Quarter at the moment, if we want something quiet. That tiff with the witches has gotten a bit messy. A few of the vampires have approached me, actually, asking for our help. I thought we might host them here, next week, have a nice little dinner party, hear them out. It might be entertaining." He cocks an eyebrow.

Elijah stands, straightening his tie. "Unless Kol's table manners have magically improved within the last seven days, I'm not sure I am entirely amicable to this idea, Niklaus."

"Bekah will keep him in check."

"Bekah will keep who in check?" she asks, throwing the front door aside and marching inside with skirt in her hands, hat bobbing on her head.

"Kol."

"Where is he, anyway? I haven't seen him all day."

"He was catting round with yet another witch the other day; I'm sure he's either entangled in some scandalous tryst, or strung up somewhere by his toes, bleeding from his eyeballs."

"You're not worried about him? What kind of big brother are you, Nik?"

"The kind who believes he is perhaps in need of a lesson about playing with his food. He'll be all right, Rebekah. He'll come crawling back in a few days, a bit bruised up at most. He killed one of the Devereaux witches a couple of years back, a very prominent young woman, and he came out of it entirely intact. The witches won't touch us. We have a bit of a reputation around here."

"Fine. You know everything, after all."

"That's true," he replies modestly.

She rolls her eyes.

"Elijah, where have you been? You know twenty-four hours with these imbeciles is a bit much for my delicate constitution. I need you to temper them. Do you know you weren't gone two bloody minutes when Kol stole one of my hats and my best pair of gloves and left little ransom notes all over the place? I had to beat him until Nik came downstairs to yell at us both for ruining his focus. I destroyed my nails."

Kol pokes his head in through the door. "I heard you extolling my virtues from two blocks down, Bekah."

"Oh, it's you, and you're not desiccated. I guess you can't always get what you want, even when you're pretty and rich."

"Why not? I do. Perhaps you're simply not pretty enough. I mean, you're palatable enough, Bekah, but who has this kind of bone structure?" Kol asks, running one finger along his own cheekbone.

He ticks Kol on the nose with his finger and gives Bekah's hair a tug as he makes his way round them out onto the street. "Elijah and I have dinner plans. You are not invited. Find a productive way to console yourselves," he tells them, and with his dimples very deep, he shuts the door in their faces.

"Well, that's annoying. Let's burn down Nik's wing of the house," he hears Bekah suggest through the door.

* * *

It starts as it always does, very gradually.

He comes home once to an empty house.

Then twice.

Then thrice.

This is how it begins.

Or perhaps he should say this is how it ends.

When his sister set foot through the door and Nik's heart skipped itself from one beat to the next, there was something inside his chest which you will say he cannot feel, for a monster has no heart.

But he did.

He feels a lot of things he's not really supposed to.

His sister to whom he bid farewell twenty years ago in a soup of London smog set foot through the door and Nik's heart skipped itself from one beat to the next, and it warmed him, it truly did, no matter what your stories have told you of beasts in their towers, but everything is a double-edged sword, darling.

Nik and Elijah and Bekah are always and forever.

And what is he?

He is an absent-minded addition.

But it's all right.

He doesn't think it's a waste, pouring all these little bits of himself into keeping their laughter.

Smile.

No; try again.

Smile, darling!

Your public awaits.

* * *

**New Orleans, 2013**

**Stefan: klaus has elena. i'm with him now, trying to figure out where she is. i don't know where he's keeping her, but she's somewhere here in new Orleans.**

**Stefan: damon you need to get here now.**

**Stefan: i can stall him for a little while but i made a mistake and now klaus is going to kill her for it.**

**Damon: not exactly the brotherly reunion i was hoping for, stef.**

**Damon: you want to stop pissing off hybrid ken at our girlfriend's expense?**

**Stefan: not really the time, damon. are you going to help me or not?**

**Damon: it's elena, stefan.**

**Damon: give me a where and a when.**

* * *

He always shuts his eyes first, to filter through other senses the world beyond.

Merely to see is such a superficial way to experience the sensation of winter on your hand, of grass bent to the boot, of technology ever on the run, towing along behind it these obsolete centuries of clumsy phone, unwieldy computer, creeping automobile.

He takes a deep breath.

He inhales the scent of city grease, December sky, human throat, history in a jumble round his feet, winter in a thin cape over his shoulders, his patience gathering snow as a mantle accumulates dust, his breath a cigar fog against sky nearly as gray.

He hears the crunching of a careful approach, the thudding of a nervous heart, the thin December breaths of lungs set against the ice of this blind white season which spares nothing.

There is the rustling of a hand burrowed down into its pocket.

The tapping of anxious fingers against buttons worn smooth by years of such handling.

The vibration of the phone within his own pocket.

He opens his eyes.

He stirs the white dust from his eyelashes and he unearths his numb feet from beneath the layer of cold which has disconnected them from his ankles, and away into his jacket goes his hand as the feet beyond turn, turn, the walls of this crumbling old fort echoing back an entreaty not unlike a prayer:

"Oh, Stef. You can pick up anytime now."

He slips the phone out of his pocket.

He unfurls from the crouch he has held for nearly three hours.

The walls round him give off a very small echo of the minute sounds of trouser legs whispering together, of boot laces stirring against eyelets, of jacket nudging shirt collar.

In the field beyond, there is a relieved sigh.

The scraping of these cautiously approaching steps through the white-powdered grass.

He switches the phone from vibration to ring tone as Damon lets it trill on.

"Stefan?"

It's rather cinematic, this tune.

Rough.

Catchy.

Music to rip the guts out by, wouldn't you agree, mate?

He smiles.

He steps forward out of the shadows.

* * *

There are two ways to make an entrance.

Make it, or do not.

But honestly.

What sort of choice is the second?

He walks forward with his arms out wide, jiggling the phone still singing its shrill little tune in his right hand, smiling to split his face.

Damon's lips tighten.

His hand sinks from ear to waist.

He hits the disconnect button on his phone.

"Klaus."

"You know, that doppelganger makes quite the bait. Not that you're particularly quick on the uptake in your sharpest of moments, but one mention of little Elena Gilbert and off you go, right into the noose at a dead sprint."

Damon tucks his hands in his pockets. "You did all this just to get my attention? I'm flattered. So where is she, Klaus? Does the treasure hunt end here, or are you going to riddle me off toward my next Easter egg? I checked with her school, and she dropped off the face of the planet about two days ago, so I know she's not there."

"She's quite safe, Damon, don't worry. And she'll be returned, quite safe, about…now."

He takes his own phone from his trousers with a little flourish, giving the elder Salvatore the full force of his dimples.

"Dave? Yes; you may let the girl go now. Give her a complimentary blood bag. I won't have it said that I'm a poor host."

He hangs up.

"Oh, and by the way," he says, and he flashes forward to sink his fangs into Damon's neck.

He rips until the man sprays.

He steps back, licking his lips. "I thought this might be a bit more fun than compulsion. You see, I could simply force you to stay and hear me out, but this way, I've given you a choice, mate. Stay and play for a bit, or crawl away from the only cure for werewolf venom in the world."

Damon spits blood all over the grass.

He backhands him onto his spine with an amicable smile. "I'm kidding, of course. You have no choice. Does that sound familiar at all?"

Damon gurgles a bloody cough up his throat. "I'm gonna' take a wild guess and say you found out about me and Blondie."

He crouches down next to him, folding his hands between his open knees. "Well, now, that's very perceptive of you, mate. Now try this one: what's going to happen to you next?"

"I'm hoping the cavalry riding in to my rescue," Damon dribbles out between his red and streaming lips.

"Sorry; fresh out of Stefans on white horses."

He slips the toe of his boot beneath Damon's back and flips him neatly over onto his stomach.

He plants one foot against the joint of his shoulder.

"You know what I've always found interesting?" he asks politely. "How simultaneously fragile and durable humanity is. You could drop a building on the human spirit, and pow, right back to its original shape it springs, soon as the bricks are lifted." He bends down to grasp the wrist of Damon's left hand, and jerks it sharply up.

Damon screams.

"But you apply just a bit of pressure to a joint in a direction it is not intended to bend, and do you hear that?" He smiles. "By the way: a bit of history. We're standing in the ruins of Fort Macomb, erected in 1815, occupied by Confederate forces during the Civil War. It was decommissioned and abandoned in 1871, but remained open to the public for quite some time. Hurricane Katrina brought the poor thing to its knees, unfortunately, and due to its dangerous deterioration, it is no longer available to local history buffs who used to wander it at their leisure. Anyway, I'm running on, aren't I? You get like that, you know, after so long wandering round this planet. Centuries of tales and anecdotes, all just stored up within you, waiting for an attentive audience. My point is, this is a nice quiet spot, so no concerns about interruptions. I hate it when that happens, don't you?"

He breaks Damon's arm at the elbow.

What a  _scream_ he gives.

Now that's gratitude for a job well done, mate.

"Would you like to hear a joke?" he asks. "Spoiler alert: you're the punch line."

He rips the daylight ring from Damon's finger and watches him curl hissing in upon himself, screaming as he burns, pieces of him flaking off to join the dry white flecks coating the grass.

"You see?" he asks, laughing. "Now that's funny, mate. But do you know what isn't?"

He drops to a knee beside Damon and he shoves his daylight ring back onto his finger so hard the joint snaps and hangs awkwardly swinging from the knuckle.

He puts his mouth right against Damon's ear. "She still remembers every single moment of everything you ever did to her. She's going to carry that with her for a very long time. It's going to color everything about her. There will be nights when she can't sleep, and it's because she sees your face. When she was presented with the possibility of a cure, there was no option at all open to her, because to be human was to be weak and vulnerable to things like you. Because you took away her power, and being a monster is the only way she knows how to get it back."

He can relate, you know.

To crush a human leg to powder with the merest clench of your fingers, to split wide a skull with the barest knock of your knuckles, to hold a man thrashing underneath you and to tear him all to pieces- that's how you  _win_.

Let him demonstrate.

First the right ankle, then the left.

Savor the crescendo for a moment.

Move on to the left knee, the right.

And now the pelvis.

Sounds rather like a very dry twig, doesn't it?

Oh come, now, Salvatore, where's your  _fight_ , mate? Where's the man who held her down while she cried, who fucked and fed as he pleased, who dragged her back into his bloody arms as she pried herself screaming from his grasp?

Not funny anymore?

Well that's unfortunate.

He finds it quite satisfactory, actually.

He kicks Damon in the head until there comes a rupture in his brain that grants him instant death, and then he punches him back awake.

He grabs him by the collar of his jacket and jerks him to his shattered feet, and he listens to the bones grind and re-set and heal themselves incorrectly as the ground bumps them messily together.

He walks Damon roughly into the side of the fort, smashes his head against the stone, throws him in through the opening, teeth scattering in his wake, bones lurid in the darkness, a cry leaking up from the ruins of this man to startle the birds flapping round the ruins of this fort, Damon's boots scrabbling round in the dirt as he slithers himself back one desperate inch, two, three-

Tch, tch, tch.

No escape for you either, mate.

About time you know how that feels, isn't it?

"I've prepared a little reception hall for you," he says, picking Damon up by the hair at the nape of his neck and heaving him forward the final few feet into the connecting room. "I've built up this collection over the years. I think you'll enjoy it. Now, I didn't want anything too bulky -we want to keep this just between us girls, after all, don't we?- so I had a few friends of mine just bring round the easily transportable items."

"Friends?" Damon spits onto the floor, bringing one arm shakily up to wipe the blood from his face.

He smiles.

"There's the spirit. You're going to need it."

He holds up a little metal contraption, the rust rubbed off it, the leaves polished to mirror, and he gives it a playful shake. "Ever heard of the Pear of Anguish? I'll explain briefly how it works- bit rude to just spring it unexpectedly on you, don't you agree? Anyway, you see these little leaves here?" He chimes his fingers across them. "I insert them into an orifice of my choice, and I turn this screw here at the top, and out and out they spread, until the skin splits. Now, I can choose to leave it there, or I can widen the device to its maximum and mutilate that orifice of choice."

He taps one fingers thoughtfully against his lips.

"Eenie meenie miney mo, catch a tiger by its toe, in which hole shall it go?"

He smiles again. "Well, I guess we shouldn't be too eager, now. After all, we still have the Judas Cradle, don't we?"

He rams the instrument into Damon's mouth and he twists the screw until the leaves fan themselves all the way open.

* * *

Damon is barely a man, when he is through.

Just a heap of slush to match the thin white blanket of the grass beyond, cooked to watery milk by these unforgiving southern rays which have nudged their heads through the clouds after all.

And yet he's still twitching, his bent and broken fingers making animal tracks in the dirt, his breath smoothing from death rattle to fever cough, his bones click click clicking once more into place, his head with its bashed and bloody temple picking itself up out of the sludge to look him straight in the eye, as mankind often will.

You see what he means, about the human spirit?

Quite the persistent little thing, with its habits that linger on for centuries.

He takes his fangs to his wrist, and he squeezes his palm into a fist that dribbles down onto the top of his boot this rich red cure.

They spend a very long time looking at one another.

He smiles. "You want to live, don't you? There you are- have at it."

And he does, crawling forth one hand to dip a trembling fingertip into this antidote, exhaling one long breath of exertion through his shattered nose, everything scraping round in him with such satisfactory jaggedness.

"Ah, ah, ah- you lick it. That's much more…dramatic, don't you think? Certain flair to that."

Damon sneers.

He slithers himself forward another inch.

He drops his head.

"Oh, and Damon? I suggest you spend a very long time jumping at shadows."

* * *

Caroline bursts into his room as he is changing out of his bloodied shirt.

"So Elena just called me, for the first time in months, and months, and  _months_. And do you know why?"

He doesn't bother to interject a guess; she'll rush right on, as freight trains often do.

"To tell me to keep my sick psycho kidnapping 'boyfriend' away from her! Elena has nothing to do with this, Klaus! You cannot just go around  _doing_ this- I cannot spend every moment I am with you wondering what is going to set you off, and how it's going to affect my friends, and whether they will ever be safe from you-"

"Elena was returned without a scratch on her. In fact, I think I rather did her a favor- doesn't this give her yet another 'woe is me, my life is a black hole of bleak misery which I will milk until the end of my days' entry for her journal?"

"This is not  _funny_. This is not something for you to joke about, Klaus. You do not get to stand here and act like this is some sort of freaking  _game_ for you to play, like these are all just pieces on the board for you to move around- these are people I  _care about_ , Klaus. I can't-" she starts, and now he can hear her voice knocking round in her throat, and with one hand to her forehead, she sinks down onto his bed, and she looks up at him from beneath her lashes, very shrunken in upon herself, such a small little thing, and there is a sudden collapse of this bloody elation an afternoon of oiling the rust from his medieval talents has put through to his heart and his pride.

He pulls his clean shirt down over his shoulders, very quietly.

"Did you kill him?" she whispers.

"Worse. I made him remember me. Centuries from now, when Mystic Falls is a mere blip on his millennial radar, he'll still wake up in a cold sweat, and he'll remember this afternoon, and he'll think about every little noise in the shadows, every tiny shift of an old house settling over his head, what they could possibly be heralding, whether he should run, and he'll picture the face of that ancient boogey monster of the supernatural world he once made war upon, and he will recall the time he was utterly helpless, and afraid, and that all he could do was wait to die, because no one cared to save him."

She shuts her eyes.

She lifts her shoulders into a sigh that expands her entire body.

"You shouldn't have done that. That's not what I  _wanted_ -"

"Then why didn't you warn him?"

She pops her eyes back open.

She is so utterly still that for a moment he can detect nothing, she sits before him, statue lids, marble lips, her monster's heart sunk in silent stillborn blood, not a touch of air in nose, throat, lungs.

He takes a breath deep enough for them both, his heart flailing, his blood deafening.

"I did," she whispers.

"No you didn't, love. He didn't have a clue, did he?"

She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes and she slumps forward to let the full weight of her forehead rest upon her palms, and she takes a shuddery breath, such a little thing, to go straight to his chest like that, and then she looks up with her wet eyes, her crumpled lips, and his shuffling step forward is just as involuntary as everything else she has pulled up out of him from the guts.

"I am a horrible person," she says, and she presses her hands together, prayer-like, and she folds them round her nose and her lips. "I didn't- you're right. I didn't say  _anything_ , and you know why?" she asks, hiccupping a little, her eyes so bloody full as they look up from either side of her fingers. "Because even though he is Stefan's brother, and Elena has feelings for him, I wanted him to…I wanted him to know what I felt like. And part of me wanted…to know that someone would actually care enough to take that kind of stand for me, you know? And if you'd killed him, part of me would have felt…vindicated, and satisfied, and so many things that I shouldn't be, and I'm just- I'm awful, aren't I?" she says so plaintively.

"Is it terrible, to wish for an abuser to understand the damage they've inflicted?" he asks quietly.

She just looks at him.

"It's all right. Either way, I like you anyway," he says awkwardly.

* * *

He's such a stupid, creepy, murdery  _jerk_.

She folds over at the waist and presses her hand to her mouth, and he just kneels down in front of her, and he puts his head in her lap and his arms around her waist, and  _why_ , is all she wants to know.

He held the head of Carol Lockwood beneath a fountain until she let loose her grip on the hardest handhold to which all humans cling as they dig in and they set their shoulder to that terrible black guillotine mortality, and his hands must have been so rough, so red, and he probably never even felt a pang, as a boy's mother exhaled her last watery minutes, he probably just stood there smiling a little, looking up at the sky, wondering what she used on her hair to smooth it to this shampoo commercial gloss, he probably was humming some stupid little creepy  _song_ , all cheerful, because down with Tyler Lockwood, the big bad has spoken, isn't he just the freaking  _worst_ , and for some reason these stupid,  _stupid_ hands touch her like she is breakable, like he can't even stand that, and he turns his face and he kisses the top of her thigh through her jeans, and what is she ever even going to freaking  _do_ with Stalky McStalkerpants and his stupid sincere face and his so way too appealing dimples and his hands full of hearts and this little look he always,  _always_ gives her just because she is Caroline Marie Forbes and it will never not be enough for him, and just  _God_.

How come it had to be, it will probably never  _not_ be him?

She sniffles a little, and puts her hand on top of his head.

"I can still kill him for you, if you like."

"Then you'd ruin any little progress you've made with Stefan."

"I'll still go back and pop his head off, if that's what you want. It's not a contest between you and Stefan, as to whose happiness I would prefer to grant."

"I can't believe I just found a murder threat kind of romantic. Is this what it's like, being a vampire?"

"Well, our disembowelment promises are also pretty sexy."

"Maybe to certain shall-remain-unnamed thousand-year-old creepers who think that breaking and entering and ransacking closets that do not belong to them are big, like, Gatsby-esque romantic gestures. I washed everything I own twice, by the way. And my whole underwear drawer? Three times." She dries her eyes on her sleeve, and she smiles just a little.

He tips his face up onto his chin to smile back at her, very tentatively, just as boyishly awkward as that guy who chafed his hand nervously in his pocket when he offered to sweep her away to Rome, to Paris, to Tokyo, who sweated just a little as he said it, who forgot to hide away in his eyes how badly he wanted her to answer yes.

"Did he…scream a lot?" she whispers, dipping her tongue out to find her lips.

"He screamed, he cried; it was quite gratifying, actually. He isn't a very attractive crier, by the way, sweetheart."

"I beat him up once, after I turned and I remembered everything he did to me," she says, combing her hand through his hair.

"I bit him and them made him lick my blood off my boot."

"Oh my God- do you always have to win?" she asks, and when he laughs, something inside her just…flips over.

So, ok.

They're going to do this.

A girl.

A boy.

Not a pair of fragile flesh and blood who will lay themselves down in a tangle of arthritis and one day forget to rise.

But maybe they'll get a pool.

Ok, so, seriously, they could have like a  _gajillion_ pools, he probably owns every resort in this entire freaking  _world_ , and on his monthly globe trots he just strides right in, and he compels himself a complacent staff, a guestless building, and he walks naked through the lobbies and skinny dips in all the places you're so totally not supposed to go nude, like the pool showers, because,  _hello_ , other people were not expecting to see that in this strictly bathing-suits-on-boobs area, but the point is maybe she's not going to get an ending, maybe when everybody else steps off this finite rotation that is the one restricted lifetime they have been allotted she just sits, and she goes on spinning, but she's going to have a damn pool, and there's going to be a naked boy in it, and he's going to smile, and it's not always going to be ok, because such is a life that buries friends and takes away fathers and will one day cover with its moist black graveyard years a mother who can never live long enough, but she is Caroline Forbes, and she'll work it.

"Caroline," he says hoarsely into the leg of her jeans, and that's all he's got.

She hunches over, and she rests the point of her chin on the top of his head, and she doesn't exactly say "thank you", because you don't thank a monster for putting into a best friend's brother the fear of God, or whatever it is that sets itself to the heels of creatures like them and sends them running for the hills, but she hurt for a really long time, she tamped it down inside herself until it grew small enough to swallow, she put up her chin and she told herself, this one's for Elena, and she never let herself expand.

And it was ok, because she was never the star of this story.

Let her subside into the kicky punch lines of the recurring guest star who stands always off to the side.

Grief is for the first-billed.

But she was Miss Mystic Falls, dammit.

Show some respect.

* * *

If you cannot return unwarped from death, if the cold black hand of Hel's final blessing sizzles where it touches, and melts the steel of you into a hot cherry puddle from which you will emerge bent anew, neither does love let off bones and morals that curve only one way.

He's waffling.

Nik says he does that sometimes.

He talks round those subjects he cannot quite bear to touch.

What he means is this:

No man walks unchanged from a fate that stopped up his lungs and crushed his heart to silence and then brought them roaring back like an ocean into his new ears.

But similarly seismic is love.

It uproots everything.

You will never be the same.

Nik's got himself quite dinged up with it.

When Nik went away with Tatia to make plans of a future that would not include his second smallest sidekick, Mother told him such was life, that one day he'd break away, and he'd find his own family too, and for three nights he laid face-down on his little bed of oak and clay, and he cried out all the unfairness of this so-called inevitability of existence.

And then he woke up with Father's hole through his heart and this new brother in place of the old, and he clung to him anyway, because spit on your little wisdoms, Mother, this is how he's going to keep them all.

He didn't mean to intrude on this moment. He just popped over like he always does, because he's found this eternal hop scotching of the veil lines up his time just a little bit better with all the hours and minutes and seconds of his siblings, and here they were, Nik with stars in his eyes, little Caroline with nearly as many in hers, and he understands.

He's funny, not slow.

Nik will infuriate, frustrate, irritate her. And she will not let it go, she will not let him wad up Father's hatred and toss it back in her face like some sort of shield behind which all his acts are exempt.

But she'll forgive him.

He'd have done that too, Nik.

But he died a third time.

Third time is the charm, after all.

So what he does is he backs slowly out of this room where Caroline Forbes has bent herself over to meet his brother cheek to cheek, and he slips very quietly away into this storage shed of the dead with its bright sky, its brighter grass, its smooth bark and its featureless blades.

"I'm going to have to stop going, aren't I," he says to Bonnie, and he forgets to be clever about it.

Nik cried a lot.

It doesn't mean he'll spend the next century or two sniffling over his dead brother Kol, who hated him when he deserved it, who loved him when he needed it, who would have come back to the stupid bastard with his arms open and his skull cocked forward in a friendly head butt for the next bloody thousand years, as many times as it took them both to fight and to forgive.

"Because you don't want to watch them move on?" she asks cautiously.

Because Bekah and Elijah already have.

Because Nik is beginning to try.

Because he's not ready, he dug himself a foothold bloody deep, and he can't just  _let go_.

Is that what true death is?

He cheated it for so long he's not sure.

Is he to poise himself at the edge of some metaphorical cliff upon which gathers his big brother who loved him after all, to wave good-bye, to leave behind for Nik his final words, to dazzle him with his sage and pornographic advice and to tip himself over the edge of this metaphorical cliff and fall with peaceful heart?

"I broke a lot of things," he says, in a voice he knows she has never heard before. "Sometimes it was them. But I did love them."

You can bury it for a while, love. Blood and bone make a terrific landfill to wedge beneath this thing like an old desk you are so very certain you no longer need.

But you never forget how to do it.

It's learning how to scale it back he's not quite got hold of.

* * *

She lets herself very quietly into the hotel room she and Stefan share, nudging the door shut behind her.

He looks up from his book and his glass of whiskey, and his instinctive smile stops halfway through as she hovers with her back against the door, heart hammering in her throat, fingers sweating against his phone. "You ok, Caroline?"

"I brought your phone back," she whispers.

He sets his book aside. "Where'd you find that?"

"Klaus had it."

He leans back against the couch, shakes the glass in his hand, brings it up to his lips with the noisy crash of ice cubes ricocheting themselves in an avalanche off glass and one another. "Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume he wasn't looking for non-profit charities in my contacts list. Please don't tell me there's a montage of Original Hybrid selfies on my phone, with me badly photoshopped into the background. 'Klaus and Stefan do Paris! And here we are at the Eiffel Tower, mate, and then the Louvre, oh, and here we are at the Champs-Élysées, which I had renamed after Caroline.'" He gives off a laugh he has to squeeze out between his lips, and sets his glass down next to his book.

He sags forward to lean his elbows onto his knees, to run a hand down his face, and she fills all of herself up with a very large breath, she lets it straighten her spine, expand her shoulders, lift her chin, and then she takes a step forward, phone extended.

He takes it gingerly from her, tosses it in his hand, watches it smack back down into his palm, keeps his eyes focused on the dark black window of the touch screen. "Who'd he kill, Caroline?" he asks tiredly.

"No one," she says, taking a seat on the couch beside him. "But he did something bad and it was sorta' my fault- ok, it wasn't my fault, he has been wearing his big boy pants for like a  _gatrillion_  years, and yes that is a word, I just made it up and it stands because I am  _so_ nervous right now, so you have to listen to me and just hand wave every stupid little thing that comes out of my mouth because I'm not even exactly sure what I'm saying right now, so you can't hold this against me later and be like, 'Remember that one time-"

"Caroline," he interrupts gently, with just a hint of a smile.

"Right. Ok." She takes another breath. "He found out about Damon and me." She leans forward to put her own elbows on her knees, to turn her head and look him eye to eye. "He didn't kill him, but I'm pretty sure Damon just had the worst few hours of his entire life, and I know he shouldn't have done that, because me and Damon are done and over with and he's your brother, and I care about you  _so much_ Stefan, and despite everything Damon's done, you still love him, and I understand that, and I don't want to see you hurt by  _anything_ , but…" Her breath is very shuddery now. "I'm not sorry about what he did."

He nods his head, still looking down at his hands.

"I don't blame you if you never want to have anything to do with Klaus, I  _completely_ understand that, but please don't let this be the thing that decides whether you're going to give him a chance. Because I was so hurt that everyone just sort of expected me to get over it and accept whatever happened between Elena and Damon because, hey, that's just what Damon does, no hard feelings, right? But I had nightmares about it for so long, and Stefan, I am a  _monster_ now, not because I don't have any other choice, because I could take off my ring, and walk out into the sun, I could do what my dad did and choose to just  _stop_ , but I don't, because I want to live, just not as that Caroline. Damon was…cataclysmic for me. It's not very easy to just put that away. But you try, because your friends want you to." It hurts when she smiles. "And then Klaus found out, and he wants to pick up where the two of you left off so badly, but if killing Damon was what I had needed, he'd have done it in a second, even though he knew that'd totally just murder any teensy little sliver of a chance he has at being your friend, and that felt…really good, in a twisted, murdery kind of way."

Stefan lets out a little laugh, and lifts one hand to balance his chin in it.

"And I know this is incredibly,  _incredibly_ selfish of me, but I'm not going to feel bad, for feeling that way." She looks down at her hands, knots them together, spreads them out to lie flat across her knees, twists them together once more. "So, I hope you can forgive a former Miss Mystic Falls, because she won a couple of scholarships that maybe she can, like, cash in or something since it's not like she's actually using them, so if you could forgive her her stabby rage thoughts about your own brother, you might possibly be looking at a cash bribe in the amount of what you could make in a couple of months working three days a week at your local McDonald's."

Stefan bursts out laughing, and with a smile, she leans her head down against his shoulder, and she shuts her eyes.

They sit like this for a very long time, his hand sneaking into her own.

* * *

"No, not that one, Bekah. It makes you look fat," he offers cheerfully from her bed, and she goes on flipping through her closet.

Why don't you take a page from the book of that old geezer who hoarded his gold in miser's mounds til from out of the shadows the mouths of the dead pressed themselves to his old ears and breathed inside the wisdom which rises from all those who have passed beyond?

They do have a piece of insight or two to share, you know.

Well, on second thought, that Ebebezer (Sneezer?) fellow was talked round to spreading his coins like bloody candy in the streets, and though Nik lapped round the feet of his creator like some sort of hound desperate for a pat, Dickens always put him to sleep faster than one of Elijah's allegorical tales which all tied themselves somehow to the creation of Pocket Squares, offspring of the One True God, Suits.

He swings his legs over the side of her bed as she turns and she tosses a dress right into his lap.

Bekah, he tells her, very solemnly.

He does bleed, you know.

He emptied out quite a lot, actually, when neither you nor Elijah seemed to care overly much that he lay in a pile of powder and ash on the Gilberts' kitchen floor.

It wasn't like Nik's love was enough.

But he doesn't spend as long as he used to, pouring himself out all over her floor as she goes on tossing shirts into his arms without even a blink.

He supposes that's what death is, for everyone.

The dead move on. The living move on.

Anyway.

It's not like you have a choice, do you, so set yourself to this conveyor belt that is grief, mate, get yourself a stamp across the chest, whir yourself on to the next stage which may be backed up by a kink further on in the machine and which may move with oiled ease onto the next section, but don't try to stick your hands into the nuts and bolts of it, to tear away at the wheels and the cogs and the levers.

It doesn't work like that.

You just keep getting carried along.

So he tells his sister, "Not that one either, Bekah, the answer is, yes, it does make your butt look big", and then he pops into Nik's office, to stand himself with a little smirk on Nik's desk and to kick over papers that don't so much as flutter, and then away into Elijah's room he whisks, to try and drape himself in one of the eldest Mikaelson's suits like a child stumping round in his father's boots, and then he just leaves.

It's what's expected of him.

He pops out of one of the trees and into the path of the Bennett witch so suddenly she screams and knocks him on his ass with a gush of wind that shrieks from her fingertips into his chest, and right back up he pops with a smile, because that's expected of him too.

"What's the news today?"

"Kol Mikaelson is a jerk?"

"No, that's hardly news, darling- shake me up a bit. How's the Gilbert twit?"

"You mean  _where_ is he, so you can go and rip his head off?"

"I don't hold grudges; he's dead, I'm dead- seems a bit petty, to keep bringing it up now."

"You ripped his head off and played soccer with it,  _at least_ three times that I know about."

"It wasn't permanent. Besides, it was funny, watching him run round like a chicken with its head cut off."

"No it wasn't."

"Yes it was." He gives her a knowing look, and nudges her with his shoulder. "Don't pretend you didn't have to force yourself to look mad. Besides, weren't you actually the goalie, for one of the games I played?"

"No!"

"Not even for the one that took place after I caught him necking with that Anna girl? Really, Bonnie, he's got three girlfriends this side of the veil, one of whom is you, and he picks that one?"

"The allure of first love, you know. I don't think he ever really got over her," she says, and she gives herself a moment to let this shadow her eyes, and then she purses her lips, and she tries very hard to look mad at him. "And stop kissing up to me- I am not going to help you terrorize poor innocent people by making them hallucinate your head spinning around while you vomit up…whatever it is they vomit up in cheap B horror movies. I don't know. I've never been much of a fan of them."

"Why not?"

"They're poorly-acted, they're poorly-written, the minority always dies? Take your pick."

"No, why won't you help me terrorize poor innocent people?"

"That's not really how I enjoy myself."

"How  _do_ you enjoy yourself? Please be very specific. Perhaps a diagram or two. Or a live performance, preferably."

"I challenge you to one minute, sans sexual innuendo."

"I can go five, but I want a prize."

She cocks her eyebrow. "Which would be?"

"You call me 'Lord Mikaelson' for the day, and follow me round pretending to carry my train, and announce me every time we come to a new section of wood. And I get to wear a crown."

"I'm not doing that. And where are you going to get a crown?"

He stops off at one of the trees as they move through this forest with no end, and he reaches up into the v between two smooth white branches, and he takes down the little mess of twig and leaf he crafted earlier.

He sets it very solemnly on his head. "One Kol to rule you all."

"Are you serious? You had that just lying around?"

"Of course not- I spent five whole minutes cobbling it together. Do you see the little bits of rock I stuck in there? Do you know how long I had to hunt round this place for them? Look how nicely they're arranged- now that's craftsmanship."

She leans in close, furrowing her brow. "Did you write 'K.M.' on all of them?"

"Yes."

"With  _what_?"

He smiles, and plucks the little coronet off his head. "Jeremy Gilberts' blood."

She leans away from him with a sigh. "Please tell me you didn't hide his head again."

"An interrogation will get its location out of me. I'm very vulnerable to breasts, nudity, and breasts with nudity."

"You already failed your challenge."

"Challenge hasn't started, and that wasn't innuendo."

"Kol,  _stop_ taking his head."

"One, two, three, could it be in a tree? Four, five, six, perhaps I hid it in some sticks. Seven, eight, nine, check around for a pine."

"That's helpful."

"And it rhymes."

She makes a face at him, and perhaps he's carried a bit of Nik off with him after all, because this face she pulls gives his heart a great unsteady twitch, and maybe if they were both beyond these trees, if she would one day shrink to a pile of cold bone and leather skin while he whittled away centuries like the cheap practice wood they are, he'd excise her like a cancer before she ate him up inside.

But he died. She died.

Most things do.

He stopped believing that after a while, but it's true.

No war has ever gone on so long as that between Death and Life, and to the side of General Reaper and his army of ash and bone will always go the victory.

You can keep popping out your babies like munitions to be polished up and sent thundering off to battle, but one day there will come a hand of bone like a scimitar over the edge of this baby's asylum of mud and blood, and up out of the trenches he will be dragged, to expire in a cloud of bullets or a breath of gas.

He's finished with that now.

He laid down his rifle and he came out with his hands up, and he's not exactly happy about it, he still has at least one brother who loves him, you know, but you don't get to go back, he  _understands_ that; one day he'll rifle through this little picture album of his head, 900 years thick, and he'll smile fondly but he won't be cut down like each memory is another of these clouds that shred to pieces the hearts of men and monsters alike, he'll think of this man Nik who forges ahead into a future without him, and he'll take a moment to rifle this picture album, because the name rings a bell, but it's been millennia, who can remember that far back anyway, and he'll be at peace.

He'll have only a warm and distant glow, where now his family makes a hole like cannon shot.

And at least-

At least she's smiling at him.

Slowly, slowly, she comes.

Not round to loving him, of course.

That's very hard to do.

But each moment is a revolution, and it turns her a little more toward him, and you can't understand how this feels, when everything else you have known and clutched for nine centuries has twisted its head round the other way, to let him die the death of the forgotten, which is the truest of all deaths.

* * *

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Yes, 'elephantine' is truly the only word to describe it."

Bonnie rolls her eyes, and then her face goes very still, very serious, and she leans back against the truck where she has propped herself, and she does not look at him. "What was dying like?"

"Which time?"

"The first. When your mom changed you all into vampires."

"It was very peaceful. My father killed me while I was sleeping. I think he wanted that for all of us, in the beginning, except Nik. He would have wanted Nik to see it coming."

"Why did your dad hate Klaus so much?"

"He wasn't a very good son. He cried when his horse died, he was terrified of pretty girls, he could use a sword well enough, but he was better at painting pretty pictures on the cave walls. He coddled his younger siblings. He cooed over Henrik almost as much as the women. Nik used to take him round on his back when he was very little, and talk to him and bounce him as he went about his chores."

"Interesting what centuries will do to someone."

He looks down at her from the branch where he perches, one hand braced against the trunk, his legs swinging. "It is, actually."

She lets her head thump softly back against the trunk, and meets his eyes for a very long time.

"What about your death, Bonnie Bennett? Was it very messy?"

"No," she says, and she smiles just a little, without humor, a very thin glaze across her eyes, her hands shaking just a little where they lie jumbled in her lap. "It was…nice, if something like that can be. I went to sleep, and I woke up here. And that was it. I didn't graduate, I didn't have kids, I never went to college. At eighteen I left a bunch of people who are going to live forever. How long do you think that's going to stay with them?" she whispers.

You'll be a footnote, Bonnie Bennett.

It's the nature of things.

History's a very quick thing: you're a part of it, you're swallowed up by it, you're trampled beneath the layers by the feet of soldiers marching off to battle and inventors sprinting to their fortunes.

It's not very forgiving that way.

"Did you read  _Arabian Nights_?" he asks.

"Yes," she says, giving him an upside-down quirk of her eyebrows.

"I think it would be poignant, to recreate that ourselves, don't you?"

"You mean stave off death by telling stories?"

"That's very nice- that makes me sound very deep. I like that. Funny, handsome, a real thinker- I really am the whole package, aren't I?"

"So I'm guessing your original intention was for us to tell each other about all the different places we've, what…been naked?"

He uses a branch above his head to heft himself into a crouch, and points down at her. "I'll go first. There was, at the beginning of all things, a very rich garden, full of everything good and beautiful, with apples red as blood, and a woman clad in only her hair. And one day, into this garden, there came a snake. The snake is a metaphor for my penis, by the way."

"Are you telling me  _Bible porn_?"

"Of course not, darling- it's Bible  _erotica_. Try and keep things classy, please."

"You're disgusting."

And many other things you'll never even guess at, darling.

But he got that very thin glaze out of your eyes, didn't he?

* * *

He talks her into watching this rare southern snow that has swept through on bitter December winds.

There's some parade about to start, a lot of jostling shoulders, bobbing heads, children with their sticky fingers put round the legs of strangers, but when you're dead, that's not so bad.

"It's so weird," Bonnie says, putting out her hand. "To see the snow, but not be able to feel it. But I guess that's how it goes, doesn't it? We get to watch. That's what's left."

"Mostly. However," he says, and he catches her hand in his own and he brings it to his lips.

"You're not as smooth as you think you are."

"Pretty sure I am."

She shakes her head and turns away.

He sidles a little closer with a smile. "Are you cold?"

"I'm dead."

"That's no reason for me to not be a gentleman," he points out, and he takes off the coat he died in with a flourish, and drapes it round her shoulders. "It smells like me, if you need a reason to accept it."

She rolls her eyes, but she leaves the coat where it lies.

He stands very close to her as he watches the snow.

In Leningrad, in 1942, there was snow like this.

He only read about it, of course, because he slept away that year in a box, but he imagines it came down very quietly, just like this, and it made of the bodies that dropped themselves right in the middle of the street gravestones of marble, just as white, veined with the black of frost set for too long, all iced up like cakes until those left with only their hunger and their dead began to eye them just like that, great frosted pastries to be consumed with their rats and bootstraps.

Humanity.

What a treat, right?

There is a great noise from up the street, the cries of children, the applause of adults, the trundling of floats grinding gamely onward through ice and snow, and round the dusty white buildings edge the stilt walkers and marching band, waving as they pass.

Bonnie goes suddenly stiff beside him.

He follows the turn of her head, and he sees Caroline Forbes dragging the funny-haired Salvatore along behind her, laughing as she struggles, her feet slipping a little on the sidewalk.

She has one of those snow hats on, very poofy at the top, its ball of fuzz and yarn standing up like a bloody antennae, and as they both watch, Bonnie unmoving, he pressing closer still beside her, Caroline snatches this hat off her head, and she sets it jauntily down on Stefan's, flicking the ball with such a loud laugh that those ringed round them awaiting the first float turn to smile, because she's pretty, she's gay, Christmas is on the run, and these are things to be celebrated, when you muffle your hands in leather and your mouth in yarn because this Leningrad snow of 1942 actually stings what it touches, it reminds you there's more to come.

"Do you want to leave?" he asks her.

She swallows, she squares her shoulders, she shakes her head.

"No."

So they watch, because it's what they do now.

They see Caroline playfully smash the hat down lower on Stefan's head when he reaches to take it off, they see him give up, they see her loop her arm through her friend's very living own, and what the little Bennett witch contemplates he does not know, but he looks at this space between the living, and he thinks about how warm it must be, and if there is a simulacrum to be gleaned from huddling beneath his coat with her soft shoulder brushing his own and her softer hair floating up to touch his cheeks.

And then Nik comes striding out of the crowd.

And beside him Bonnie whispers, "She's so happy," and there is something thick in her throat, fattening up the seams of her voice until they burst, and he can very nearly hear them shatter, and scatter round his feet, because do you know another thing he learned in his 900 years- words are very brittle things, and sometimes they fill your mouth like sawdust and sometimes they fill it like glass, but they do not so often flow like honey as the tawdry romance novels of Bekah's 21st century brush with literature would suggest.

So what he adds to this little tableau, happy Caroline, humoring Stefan, smitten Nik, a dead girl crying beside him, a sky weeping above him, half the population poured out over this wide white sidewalk, the float wheels crunching in the street, the stilt walkers teetering on the ice-

It's just a little thing, as are all things allotted to dead men, who get their rights ladled out of the soup pots of slums.

"He's looking right at me."

"He can't see you, Kol," Bonnie tells him, very gently.

Nik falls in beside Caroline, takes from Stefan some barb which seems more jest than cruelty, knocks the snow from his boots with little taps of his toes on the sidewalk.

Stefan Salvatore will be another handful of dirt on the grave of Kol Mikaelson.

It's not a friendship, Salvatore's still got that shifty look of the hunted prey, he steps forward just far enough to put himself into this position of valiant knight-errant should the dragon deem himself suddenly weary of his princess and turn upon her with barely a warning, but he got a look like that from Nik once, when his heart still beat loudly in his ears.

All hail Stefan Salvatore, the wondrous sixth Mikaelson brother, plugger of that tiny hole made by the fifth child, who at least has himself the good grace to fade quickly.

He bets you don't have a kicky one-liner to your bloody name, Salvatore.

Do you even  _know_ how 'There once was a man from Nantucket' ought to end? How to turn round one of Nik's awful puns and to stab him in the face with the horror of this suffering he inflicts upon victims of all age, size, economic status, to rip from beneath him his pedestal and to laugh at him as he flails round without it?

This is what brothers do, Stefan Salvatore.

Caroline stands on tiptoes to kiss the tip of Nik's red nose, and the bloody boob splits his face like he's trying to swallow her pretty head.

But how often does Nik smile like this, he thinks, and he sort of basks in it, because this too is what brothers do. They stand just there, right in the very blind spot they know you'll not turn to check, and they let their heart fill, and spill over, because you are so bloody happy it radiates right out of your stupid bloody face.

They go back to watching the snow, the stilts, the children with their faces painted in red and in green.

Bonnie tenses beside him again.

She is not looking at Caroline anymore.

"There's a lot of magic here."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I think there's an entire coven here, Kol. Maybe even more."

He flicks his eyes to Nik. "Where?"

"I don't know- it's everywhere. All around us. I can't pinpoint it exactly, not on this side of the veil. It's like an echo of what I used to be able to sense." She looks up at him from her very big eyes. "Something bad is going to happen, Kol. Caroline-"

"Nik will take care of Caroline. I'll take care of Nik," he says, and he spins round on his heel.

"What are you doing? Kol, he can't hear you- he doesn't even know you're  _here_."

"Right," he acknowledges, and in a blink he changes his face from man to monster, letting the veins crawl like vines down his cheeks, the irises ink themselves from brown to black. "But somebody does."

He walks until a man flinches back from him with wide mouth, wider eyes, and he flashes right up in his face. "Keep your mouth shut, if you never want to see me again. Do we understand, darling? Good. Do you see that man over there? Curly blonde hair, black jacket, standing beside the blonde girl in the red coat? Go up to him -be discreet about it- and tell him there are witches in the crowd, a lot of them. Tell him not to be a bloody idiot and whip his pecker out to show them how big it is. Tell him to take himself and his pretty little girlfriend, and slip off somewhere quiet. Do this, exactly as I just told you, or one night, I'll be lurking in the shadows where things like me live, and I'll watch you stroll along home to your pretty wife and your little girl, your aging parents, your 'roommate' with the skilled mouth, whatever you hold most dear, and I'll sneak into their rooms, and I'll stroke their hair as they sleep, and I'll whisper stories in their heads until they smile, and then I'll reach inside, and I'll pull their innards up through their throats. Have we got all that?"

"Yeah," the man whispers, his nostrils flaring.

"Then run along," he says, flicking his hand.

Bonnie steps up beside him, hunched beneath his jacket, cupping an elbow in either hand. "You think this will work?"

He watches the man reach Nik.

He watches Nik's face tense.

He watches Nik turn and scan the crowd, and he smiles, and he gives a little wave, and his brother keeps on looking, until he drops his hand and his smile and he stands with his hands in his pockets with the snow between them, and a wall of shoulders, and his brother's undead heart and his just dead own.

"Kol," she whispers.

He hears, from up the street, the popping of caps pried free from frosted cars, a sudden rush like a dam burst, the trickling of this surge making its way from the mouths of gas tanks, the stench of petrol a sudden prizefighter's blow to even the noses of these deaf dumb humans, who scrunch up their nostrils and who flinch back from this assault.

Nik takes Caroline's arm.

Stefan slips his hands from his pockets.

He swallows.

Bonnie presses up against him.

Down the white street come these translucent little fingers like water, here a gush, there a dribble, the flow diverting itself around one float and crawling with hand dexterity up another, these translucent little fingers like water making their way round the crowd, to ignore these legs and to drench those boots, and now there follows another rush, and it carries with it a blast as from a furnace, not very blistering, for a man whose cheeks burned up long ago, but he remembers it well, he knows what drives these humans back against one another with screams to wake the dead, and he watches with a flinch these sudden living torches who stumble forward into the street, their fat sizzling, their hair smoking-

Caroline screams.

Nik pushes her on ahead of him.

One of the floats goes up.

He imagines it smells like the hair that withered and blew away from the back of his hands, and the skin of his forearm, which popped and peeled itself open to lay bare his quivering Matryoshka muscles, a Kol within a Kol.

Very interesting, if it's not your forearm.

" _Caroline_!" Bonnie screams as this deluge finds its way through the crowd, and it slops over her boots, crawls its way up her shins, onto her kneecaps, soaking her trousers, the hem of her jacket, and whoosh, there she goes, very orange, very noisy, very like his own final moments, brought to his ashy knees by some little boy and his stick.

Nik tries to put her out with his jacket.

He flips her onto her face in the snow, holds her down as she thrashes, scoops handfuls of thin trampled ice onto her back, Stefan on the other side of her doing the same, kicking up clumps from the drifts which have stacked themselves against businesses, both of them talking to her through her sobs, Nik's voice very tight, Stefan's quite soothing-

She reignites.

"Bonnie, can you tell who they are?"

She has both hands to her mouth.

" _Bonnie_."

Caroline crackles so loudly he nearly misses her answer.

"I can't  _tell_ , I told you that! Oh my God-  _Caroline_ -"

"Calm down, Bonnie. Nik will do something murdery soon, don't worry."

He never disappoints, does Nik.

He leaves Stefan to it, and he reaches out to casually snap the neck of a fleeing woman.

He takes from the chest of a nearby man his still-glistening heart.

He catches some scrap of a teenager about the waist, and he breaks the boy with barely a flex of his arms.

He throws them all into a pile.

He adds a mother, her child, the man who rushes in to help them.

He holds out his arms. "How many do you want? I'll build a wall," he yells above the screaming of the monsters who spin themselves like tops on the ground, flailing themselves into all the wettest parts of the street.

Caroline sobs and she burns and Stefan pats her down with snow gone to water against her very orange and black back, quite a Halloween mosaic, and Nik goes on standing with his arms out, smiling like the devil with whom you have just made a deal, both his arms red to the elbow, his shoulders flung back, his eyebrows lifted playfully-

And the fire peters out, as fires so often do when Nik wants them to.

They let the rest burn to their conclusion.

Nik touches her very gently, when he rolls her over onto her back.

Beside him, Bonnie lets out all the breath she does not need.

"Are you all right?" he asks her.

She watches Nik give Caroline a moment to heal the worst of her, and then he lifts her into his arms, tipping her head down to rest in the crook of his neck, and he makes his way through the crowd with Stefan at his side, Caroline's black legs swinging.

"You see?" he says gently, and he has to test out this particular nuance of the voice first, roll it around a bit, because he's not much used to a tone like this, it's got a rather strange heft in his mouth, a bit of rust round the edges. "Nik doesn't half-ass his devotion."

"I can't believe the way he looks at her."

"Imagine that. Even monsters have layers."

"Even you?"

"Of course. Pretty, prettier, prettiest." He taps the end of her nose with his pointer finger, and he smiles.

"Let's go back."

"All right. I have a soccer game at 4:00 anyway. There was a boy who got himself dead, but do not weep, for he had a nice head. I could not resist the call, to use it for my ball, for the only good field, is one which is red."

"How many of those do you have?"

"900 years worth, darling."

"And I really can't desiccate anyone, on the other side?"

"Why would you want to, when you are surrounded by such wit, and beauty, and when I have it on good authority that yes we can in fact still shag over there?"

"Do I really need to respond to that?"

"No; the abject Kol devotion in your face makes your feelings on the subject perfectly clear."

She is still looking after Caroline, a crease over her brow. "Is she going to be ok, over here?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. That's not really our domain anymore, is it? It's up to the living to stay that way. We're dead, not babysitters."

"Is that why you rushed in to warn Klaus?"

"I don't want Nik over here- you spend 900 years on the receiving end of his sense of humor, and then tell me that death is not a welcome reprieve."

The crease softens. "And that's why you talk about him all the time. Because you don't miss him. Because you're glad you can sit there and talk at him for hours, and he'll never even look up."

Nik is already gone, of course.

But he squints after him anyway.

"I'm not always bad. Time does leave a few things behind."

She gives him this little thing that is not quite a smile, but neither is it a condemnation.

It's quite the step, for a creature like him.

"I guess so," she says.

* * *

"Do you think Kol is still…hanging round somewhere?" Nik says to her one day as she watches him root round in the library, his eyes overly focused on the shelf in front of him, his hands very carefully schooled to stillness.

"Kol's dead," she snaps.

"I'm well aware of that,  _Rebekah_ ," he snaps right back, turning with a battered copy of  _Faust_ in his hands. "But when the witches had their little demonstration during the parade, that man who came up and warned me- he said to me, 'There are a lot of witches in the crowd. Don't be a bloody idiot and whip your pecker out to show them how big it is.' Who does that sound like to you? And how did he  _know_? He was human."

"Nik, Kol's not floating round like some sort of guardian angel. He's on the other side, with Mother, and Father, and that's the way it is. And that's the way it's always going to be. He's gone, Nik, just like Henrik. You don't get him back just because you want to."

He jiggles the book round in his hand, staring down at it. "I know that," he says, very quietly, and he swallows, and he barely meets her eyes when he looks up at her.

Oh Nik.

You don't have to go and look like such a stupid bloody  _boy_.

"I just- Do you think he misses us, Bekah? Do you think he even wants to come back?"

* * *

Yes.

* * *

"Can we go anywhere we want?"

"I don't think so. I tried once. I wanted to go to Russia. But crossing over isn't about freedom, is it? We're wandering round because we're still chained to something."

"You to your family, and me to my friends."

"And yet, you snip the apron strings, and you have no reason to cross over anymore."

"And you're just stuck here," she says, looking down at her hands. "But we have to move on eventually, don't we? And it'll be worth it? We'll be at peace, we'll have found…something, won't we?"

He wants to tell her yes; he wants to set at ease her young mind not yet full of the simultaneous shit and gold of man, who breaks your heart with a careless blow and pieces it meticulously back together.

But Bonnie-

He does not want to go alone to his uncertain fate, to walk beyond your happy sated mind where he hasn't got a family, there is only him, a middle child whose fate perhaps is to be always overshadowed, but who at least finds himself never not  _surrounded_.

One of the things which carries over from manhood into the kingdoms of monsters is the grime and stigma of this word,  _alone_.

And you get so much of it, as a monster. Time leaves you alone. Death leaves you alone. Why do you think he never stopped prodding at Nik, at Bekah, at Elijah? To grant them the strange peace of mind which comes with the eternal buzzing of the gnat, who eventually makes of himself a friend, with his wings that combat the silence which all man thinks he wants until it seeps through to his heart and anchors it to his boots?

Perhaps.

He didn't lie; time does leave some things to boys who become demons.

But mostly he did it for himself.

He's got a big smile because he has so very much to cover up.

So he says, "I don't know", and he just leaves it at that.

He never said time leaves much to boys who become demons.

He never said he wasn't a coward.

That's Nik's little hang-up.

* * *

"Announcing, the Kol and Bonnie Show!"

"What?"

"Today we're doing Robin Hood."

" _What_?"

"Try and keep up, darling. Today's it's Robin Hood, those are the sheriff's men, and obviously I'm the dashing hero of this story, and who do you want to be? Maid Marian, or one of the merry men? 900 years gives you quite a liberal outlook on homosexuality, so I can have an affair with you either way. Choose fast, please. Do you see that woman with the face like a cow? She assured me she was going to cut off a very private place of mine and make me eat it."

He swings his bow down from his shoulder.

"Where did you get that?"

"I made it. The string is one of my bootlaces. See?" He bunches his trousers up in his hand and lifts the hem to proudly show her.

"And why is there an entire crowd of very pissed-off monsters suddenly charging up the hill at us?"

"It turns out people don't get any less touchy with death. They might even be a little more sensitive."

"So you pissed all of those people off because…?"

"I can't be a dashing outlaw without an angry mob, can I? Choose your role. I suggest one of the merry men; forbidden love is always much more interesting anyway."

"I'm not- Kol, they are going to rip us apart," she says, taking a step back as up the hill surges this grim-faced horde with its bovine leader, her hands like wrecking balls, her nostrils snuffling about with pig insistence.

"Cryst have mercy on his soule; that dyed on the rode. For he was a good outlawe; and dyde pore men moch god!" he shouts, and he lets fly an arrow that thumps weakly off the woman's forehead and tumbles away to be snapped beneath her feet. "You see, that's why I always had Nik make my arrows."

" _Kol_ -"

"You're eighteen, you're dead, fuck it. Let's have a bit of fun with it, shall we?"

He passes her the bow. "I've decided. You're one of the merry men. You're not really suited to some cringing 15th century daisy anyway." He flashes round behind her, and he lifts the bow in her hands and sets another arrow to the string, and with her still clutching the smooth white curve of the limb, he draws the string back to her mouth, and he releases it with a noisy  _thwack_.

The arrow rebounds off the woman's thick shoulder. "You see? Now you're a criminal like me."

He loops his arms round her from behind to pluck the bow from her hands. "Run."

She does.

"Tomorrow let's do Snow White!" he hollers as he crashes through the brush, bow jouncing against his shoulder, leaves passing themselves with fleeting indignation over his cheeks, stinging as they go, the blue sky thin in his lungs, the green grass springy beneath his feet, Bonnie panting along beside him, the woman snorting behind them, his hair flying, his laceless boot lolling out its tongue to snarl together his feet with fatal precision, his sprint kinked by a stumble, his legs jerked out from underneath him-

Bonnie gets a hand round his elbow, brings him to his knees with a sharp jerk, hunches over with a startled grunt as he sags himself to deadweight in her hands. "I'm hit!" he cries loudly.

"Are you  _kidding_ me?"

"I'm adding a bit of dramatic tension," he stage whispers. "Now the audience gets to see your struggle- to leave behind a wounded comrade to a fate worse than sex with an ugly partner? Or to drag him along behind you, slowing your own escape, making nearly inevitable the capture of you both? And will we find refuge in one another's arms before they spit our heads on some sticks and parade us round like cheap but very attractive Halloween decorations, or will we tragically expire with our love unrealized?"

She rolls him into a nearby tangle of undergrowth, and crawls after him.

"I can't believe I'm doing this," she hisses.

He presses his finger to her lips.

They lie stretched out on their bellies with both their dead hearts going in his oversensitive ears, Bonnie's shoulder scraping his own, one of his hands tangled somehow round her hair, a scattering of twigs prickling his scalp, a bit of gravel gouging up his hands, the bow digging into his hip, boot halfway down his foot, all of him suspended within this one moment, itching scalp, burning hands, tingling shoulder, this thin blue sky pent up and held within his lungs like those long-ago clouds of savored cigar-

The woman and her little entourage thunder past.

Bonnie lets her cheek sag down into the dirt, and ticks her eyes toward him.

"Anyway, as I was saying," he continues cheerfully, "let's do Snow White tomorrow. I'll be the handsome prince, of course, you the cursed princess fated to her eternal sleep. There'll be a snake. Do you remember what the snake stands for?"

"That is  _not_ how Snow White gets woken up."

"Not in the Disney version."

* * *

He knows how this works; he's watched quite carefully this courtship of Nik and Caroline.

You slice open a bit of yourself and you bleed our your ugly drip by drop, until there comes someone who swallows it in increments, who washes this down thoughtfully and who turns it round in their mind until they learn to separate the sweet from sour, and this is love.

Or near enough to.

Near enough to is as close as some will ever get.

So he tells her about the first innocent he ate, except he doesn't give her the flippant version he fed to his family, because Kol the Clown is not allowed his regrets, he tells her what it is to stick your hand down into the roots of a man not much older than you, and to pull until out pops something you are not supposed to crave, all red and glistening, to smash it to your teeth like the sawdust and paste bread of a starving man and to slurp it down to wriggle about your belly like an eel not submitted to its fate.

And he tells her that time is an eraser, and it smudges out most, that he isn't sorry anymore, that never again will he be sorry, because what is one wriggly little man at home in his belly, when on the heels of monsters charge the fevers of plagues, the grapeshot of war, the inevitability of years.

This is how the world turns, Bonnie Bennett.

It crushes most beneath it.

The trick is just to roll with it.

"Also," he says, "Can you get your legs behind your head?"

She hits him.

* * *

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!" he calls up into the tree, and from its topmost branches unfurls a length of braided twig and leaf, coiling at his feet.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, when's the last time you washed this?" he calls up into the tree, bracing his boots against the trunk as he climbs.

She waits until he is halfway up, and then she unties this braided rope of twig and leaf from the branch around which she has anchored it.

She waves as he falls.

* * *

"There's a lot of talk about the witches going around the streets, that they're working up something big," Tim tells him one afternoon, twisting his cap nervously in his hands.

He turns the pen in his hand with a frown. "All right. Keep your ear to the ground, mate."

Caroline looks up from her file as Tim ducks out into the hallway, flipping over the page in her hand. "What do you think's going on?" she asks, setting the file on the corner of his desk and furrowing her brow at this paper which has apparently committed quite a grievous offense.

"Just another of the many unsuccessful bids for my life, I'm sure. You ought to know quite a bit about that. Though, in the defense of your friends, they at least had somewhat of an idea of what they were doing, sending you in as a distraction. Not that they got anything else right."

"Excuse me, but we desiccated you…for like three seconds, but that's beside the point."

"If they'd stuck you in the coffin with me, I'd have gladly stayed a bit longer." He smiles.

"Stop flirting with me- I'm trying to work." She flaps the paper at him in protest. "By the way, do you know that guy has a crush on you?" she demands, pointing after Tim.

He innocently raises an eyebrow. "Does he now?"

"Nik shagged him back in the early 20th century," Rebekah adds, popping her head in through the door just long enough to drop this little bomb with its instant effect on Caroline's red cheeks.

" _What_? You have some pretty former man toy hanging around the house doing your bidding and checking our your butt and probably stealing your panties to sleep with at night because vampires get really super freaking  _weird_ about boundaries, the older they get?"

"Thank you, Rebekah," he snaps.

She pops back in. "If you're going to get upset over every little tryst of Nik's, you're going to work yourself up into quite a froth, living in this city. He's probably slept with over half the supernatural community. And he didn't even kill all of them afterwards."

"I don't care about  _every_ little 'tryst' of his, because apparently, he was quite the revolving door of a man slut back in his day. What I take  _issue_ with is some old freaking  _flame_ hanging around making fluttery princess… _googly_ eyes at him."

"Not to worry, Caroline- we all know who Nik's making his own fluttery princess googly eyes at, and it isn't some pretty little boy who had his virginity taken in this very room, if I remember correctly."

"Get  _out_ ," he snaps, and his pen embeds itself in the door half an inch from her eye.

She plucks it free with a smile and javelins it into his wrist when he's swiveled himself round toward Caroline.

" _Bekah_!"

"Ok, how would you feel if Tyler was one of my minions?"

"Is he on a leash?" he asks, jerking the pen from his wrist.

" _No_. He's spending almost every waking moment hanging around me like a little lost puppy, with his  _penis_ in his eyes every time he looks at me."

"He might want to get that checked. That's not normal, love, even for the rather…flexible anatomy of the hybrid."

" _You are not funny_! Rebekah, tell your brother he's a giant, clueless, stupid jerk!"

"You're a prat, Nik."

"Right. Whatever that means in American."

"Rebekah, would you excuse us?"

"No."

"Well do it  _anyway_."

"I don't want her to," Caroline snaps. "Guess which Original is annoying me less today? I'll give you a clue- it's not the one who sleeps with all his employees! Isn't that, like, sexual harassment?"

He rolls his eyes. "Yes, sweetheart- I'm expecting a notice from HR any moment now."

"Well I hope he's suing."

He gives her his dimples. "You know better than anyone that punishing me is hardly the reaction following a 'tryst' with me."

"Gross." She shoves the paper she is still holding back into its folder. "There's not enough room in here for both me and your ego, so I'm just going to go. By the way, I have Klaus' credit card- want to go buy a bunch of totally frivolous stuff we don't need?" she asks his smirking sister, still hovering about in the doorway like she's actually bloody  _wanted_.

"On Nik's dime? Of course."

"Excuse me," he snaps, standing up. "Did you not hear what Tim just said about the witches? The same ones who not three days ago nearly burned you to death?"

"Oh, you mean your boyfriend?"

"Caroline," he warns, tensing his jaw.

"Relax your panties, Nik. Caroline and I can handle ourselves without your big manly arms to save us."

"Yeah. And anyway, you're going to need your big manly arms to keep yourself warm tonight. And to haul a pillow and maybe a blanket down to the couch in the living room. Or whatever the fancy, snooty term for that room is."

"And why the hell would I do that?"

"Because I'm going to sleep in your bed tonight, and I'm not sharing it with you."

"I have over a dozen guest rooms. Why would I sleep on the bloody couch?"

"It's the principle of the thing, Nik."

He pinches the bridge of his nose.

"Ok, so I saw these super cute Jimmy Choos in Nordstrom the other day, and I was thinking they'd go really well with that red dress I have- you know the one with the sort of scooped neckline?"

"You mean the one you stole from a poor, innocent sales attendant who was probably fired afterward, when the inventory didn't add up correctly?" he interjects.

"I stole a different pair of Jimmy Choos than the ones I'm talking about right now, not the dress. Please keep up. And do not try and guilt me, Klaus- you drink the blood of newborns for a mid-afternoon pick-me-up. And anyway, everything is going to be completely on the up-and-up this time."

"Yes, how principled you are, with the credit card you've pinched from my wallet."

"I'm surprised you even  _have_ a credit card. Don't you just, like, beat up poor kids and steal them down to their Wal-Mart underwear?"

"Of course not, Caroline- what kind of villain leaves his victim even that small amount of dignity?"

She rolls her eyes and flounces off toward the door.

"Are you going to be careful?" he snaps.

"Actually, my big plan was to go play in oncoming traffic and then maybe poke a couple of witches. Probably insult a werewolf's mother. And then I thought I could tell Marcel I spend most of my time carefully turning his own people against him?"

"Occasionally you do something right, Nik," Bekah says, and she links her arm through Caroline's.

"Are you complimenting me?"

"I'm not insulting you."

Caroline smiles. "I'll take it."

He throws up his hands. "Well I'm glad you ladies have found a bit of common ground."

"Say that to us after you see the bill, Nik."

Bekah smiles.

She slams the door in his face.

* * *

"Throw down yer sword, ye scurvy dog!" he yells.

"En garde!" she replies, half-heartedly.

He lunges forward; she bats the length of wood in his hand awkwardly away.

"I ne'er seen such a blaggard as the likes o' ye!"

The little Bennett witch ducks his swing, thrusts up with the branch in her hand, is turned aside with a deft parry.

He holds his roughly-hewn sword in one hand, the other tucked behind his back, whisking here, there, spinning her up into such a frenzy, hair in her eyes, eyebrows in a flat line across her brow, shoulders heaving, heart going, all of her funneled into this smooth white extension of limb she darts tentatively in toward his shoulder, lips pressed in concentration-

He knocks it easily aside, gives her a blinding poke to the ribs, steps round behind her as she swings clumsily.

"You're terrible at this, darling," he says, tapping the tip of his blade on her shoulder, flashing round in front of her as she whirls, giving her another jab to the ribs, the thigh, one rather cheeky prod to the ass-

She kicks his sword aside with a great crack.

"You just cut off your own foot."

"It's not the only thing that's going to get cut off." She arches an eyebrow.

"Relax your hands. You're not trying to keep Gilberts' little twig from slipping through your fingers."

She swings for his head.

He ducks and comes up within her guard, half an inch away. "Very nice. Good energy- I like that. However, you're still terrible. This means I take the ship, and all the plunder that comes with it."

She takes a step back and holds out both her arms to encompass the tree behind her, the featureless forest beyond, this sky of blue canvas and earth of green carpet. "You're welcome to my 'ship'."

"And the plunder?"

She presses her lips together again, and suddenly bursts out laughing. "Could you take your crown off, please? It's ridiculous. And not very…piratey."

He points at her. "That's your jealousy talking, Captain Bennett."

"Yeah. I promise you it's not."

He nudges the little coronet back to the center of his head. "You will submit to me and my crew, posthaste, Captain."

"I think your crew ran away with your terrible accent."

"It wasn't terrible. Who sailed with pirates in the 1500s, darling?"

"Did you?"

He smiles. "No. But I did invade one of their ships, eat all of them, and then sail off after Rebekah, who had commandeered a ship from Gráinne O'Malley- the infamous 'Sea Queen of Connaught'- and spent a few years puttering round the Irish coast, blowing holes in anything that crossed her path. She was quite mad when I crashed my little Ballinger into her. She actually drowned me, for that one. A couple of times, actually. Elijah saved me eventually, after he thought I'd learned my lesson about picking on Bekah." He smiles again, and leans in a little closer. "I didn't. She's very fun to poke, you know."

Bonnie does not let herself lean away from his lips half an inch from her own.

He just loves it when they don't back down.

Gives the heart quite the little flutter, doesn't it, Nik?

"Anyway. The plunder to which I am entitled, by right of combat," he says, and he drops his sword as he ducks under her arm and he tosses her with a startled scream onto his shoulder, one arm coming up to cinch round her thighs.

"What are you doing?"

"I invade your ship, I drink all your liquor, I take your women. It's what pirates do."

"Put me  _down_ , Kol," she demands, but she laughs when he whips himself into a spin that digs her nails down into his shoulder, and it's a very nice thing, you know.

When death came and it stole from her eighteen-year-old lungs all the breaths she never got to bestow upon dusty gray years full of the grandchildren of her grandchildren, it took from her something much more vital.

You can live without breath.

He ought to know.

What even a monster requires is laughter.

It's not an easy thing to scrabble up from the sewage of centuries. What have you to toss your head back and roar about, boy? You're nineteen, you've got a hole in your chest, you watched the big brother who always eclipsed these mortal deities of myth bury your mother in wet black earth and tears.

There's a trick to it, after a while.

If that motivational idiom 'fake it till you make it' can be attributed to anyone, surely it is to the Mikaelson family with its centuries of duplicity and devotion this credit goes.

That's the tragedy of any life which goes on for too long.

She is still laughing when he flips her down off his shoulder and catches her in his arms.

You have a nice smile, Bonnie Bennett, he wants to tell her.

But this is not a love story.

Perhaps it's not a tragedy, despite what you may think about this great beyond that swoops in before you are ready, and carries you off to the unknown.

But it's not a love story.

He never had one of those.

But he does smile back.

Nik might tell him, here is where it begins, little brother, and it's not going to be ok, you will not emerge all in one piece, this smile will cut you down to stumps and leave you hobbling round on bone, but they're worth it, these women who will not be bent to the blade, and he thinks to himself, he thinks, Nik-

You're probably right.

Forget he said that.

You've a big enough head for the doorways of giants, big brother.

* * *

"What is this?"

"This, is my maze."

Bonnie crosses her arms and lifts both eyebrows. "Your maze."

"Right," he says, and he touches the tip of his finger to the tip of her nose. "It took me…I don't know how long it took me, over here. But it took a great many days, and a great many trees, and thus was the Wall of Kol built."

"The Wall of Kol."

"Right. Oh, and also I made a pan flute," he says, and produces it from his pocket. "And there are my rats!" he exclaims, pointing excitedly.

Beyond the fringe of this forever forest, the woman with her cow face and her pig snout stumbles uncertainly forward, guided by the hand of some bloke in breeches and wide linen collar, the stump of her neck still giving a pitiful spurt here and there, the broad feet tap tap tapping along in the grass.

"What did you  _do_?" Bonnie demands as behind the woman there fans an entire cloud of these ungainly creatures, shuffling their way on awkward sleepwalker toes, thrashing their arms as they go.

"I took their heads, and I hid them round the maze. Now, if they're smart, and they have any friends I didn't get to, they'll establish a buddy system. Bit hard to look for your head without any eyes." He plays a little tune on his pipe, and waves them forward. "So I lead them into the maze, right? And I let them have at it, and every so often I pop in like the Cheshire Cat of Wonderland, and I give them little cryptic hints to guide them toward their reunions. Not that I'd be particularly looking forward to mine, if I were that woman. I absolve my mother and father of all their sins against my family after such a gift," he says, gesturing to his face. "Not everyone can be so lucky."

Bonnie rolls her eyes.

"Come on." He slips his hand into hers, and yanks her through the opening of this massive jumble of trunks piled upon branches, the meticulously stacked walls looming a good two feet above his head.

"I don't think so. You can deal with the pitchforks and torches today. You know, one day, some of these people are going to catch up to you, and they're going to spend the rest of eternity ripping you into little pieces and scattering you all over this side of the veil, over and over again. And that's going to be the rest of your life. Death. You know what I mean."

"You wouldn't let them do that to me."

"I wouldn't?"

"No. Because yesterday, while I was racing you to the top of that one tree, you lost because you were busy checking out certain assets of mine. And you liked what you saw." He smiles very devilishly.

"Yeah. It didn't have anything to do with the fact that you're one of the oldest vampires in the world, and can move at approximately the speed of light."

"But you did look, didn't you?"

"It was all I could focus on. They're like steel. You are the romance cover hero of my turgid, rippling bicep dreams, Kol Mikaelson."

"I think you just flirted with me."

"I did not."

"Pretty sure you did."

"Pretty sure if I was flirting with you, I would have explained that I was too focused on trying to out-cheat a thousand-year-old vampire who could have been a gentleman and not used all his advantages to reach the top of the tree in three seconds to pay attention to anything else. But that I wouldn't mind the opportunity to take advantage of the view, next time."

" _That_ was flirting." He taps the tip of her nose again, and she wrinkles it beneath his finger.

" _Theoretical_ flirting." She looks up from beneath her lashes, and she gives him a smile to end his very dead heart. "But I'll let it stand."

He knows he stands here for a moment too long beaming at her, her hand for some reason still in his own, the pipe awkwardly between them like he doesn't bloody know what else to do with this space from her belly to his, just a scant little thing really, three inches he could cross in a moment, to press himself sternum to sternum with her and to take her mouth very tentatively, with more care than he has done anything in a very long time, their foreheads touching, breath mingling, eyes shut not with instinct but the heaviness of moments such as these.

But he's dead.

He has time to bide.

So he takes his hand and he slips it from her own for just a moment, to reposition the fingers, to thread them through her own, and then he jerks her round the corner as at the entrance coalesce these sleepwalkers on their shuffling zombie tiptoes.

"Do you want to hear the first riddle?" he whispers in her ear as they begin to fumble their way inside. "Brothers and sisters have I none, but that man's father is my father's son."

"How does that help them figure out where their heads are?"

"It doesn't. I just like to confuse them." He pushes her on ahead of them. "Get on with it, Bennett. It's a big maze. And I'm not sure you've been nice enough to me to get led out of it without a lot of begging on your part."

"That's fine. I'll just hang around until everyone gets their head back, and then list off all the spots they're most likely to catch you."

"But what if they go for my face?"

She shrugs, and lets her hair swing down to hide her smile. "There are still other parts of you worth looking at."

" _That_ was flirting."

"Maybe," she says without looking at him.

* * *

He taps gently at the door of Caroline's hotel room and rocks back on his heels as she pads her way across the carpet.

"Oh. It's you."

He tries out his best smile.

She lifts an unamused eyebrow.

He lets it fall.

"I was wondering if we might actually spend a bit of time together. If, of course, you haven't got a long night ahead of you, carousing about the town with my sister and my credit card."

"Sorry; I already made plans. I figured you had a date with your boyfriend."

He sticks his hand between door and jamb as she tries to shut it in his face.

" _Excuse_ you."

"Caroline," he says, and of course it comes out much too plaintively, she reels up out of him so many words, feelings,  _nuances_  which for a thousand years have gone unknown, and does she have to make such a bloody _beggar_ of him? "What do I have to do?"

There is a slight crumbling of her face as she takes her hand from the door and crosses her arms.

"You have to understand why it would upset me that some pretty boy ex with whom you probably had ragingly hot sex -because I'm pretty sure you have ragingly hot sex with everyone you sleep with, which is apparently the entire freaking  _world_ \- is hanging around all day drooling over my…Klaus."

"Your what?"

"Well, I don't know what to call you! My boyfriend? My eternal love companion? All I know is that a 'my' goes in front of it."

He moistens his lips with a little smile. "Your astoundingly attractive, unfairly talented, worldly, intelligent life partner?"

"With an ego even bigger than other parts of him."

"Surely not much bigger."

She rolls her eyes. "Oh my God.  _Bye_ , you completely unrepentant, annoying, smug, hybrid…jerk face."

He wedges his foot inside this time, and with a couple of unsuccessful knocks of the door against his boot, she lets go entirely, spinning round to precede him on thunderous feet into the main suite of her room, curls bouncing against her shoulders, arms swinging with such righteous vigor he gives a little cough to coat the laugh in his throat, to force it back down into his belly.

"Caroline!" he calls after her. "Do you want me to eat him?"

"You can do whatever you want with him, Klaus. Far be it for me to stand in the way of one true skanky man sex."

He kicks the door shut behind him and scrubs a hand down his face. "He's loyal, he's hard-working, and he does everything I tell him to- in short, he's the perfect little minion. And I just offered to eat him for you."

"Well excuse me for not getting all hot and bothered over your little romantic murder gesture."

"Let's not put on our saintly little nun face, shall we, love?" he snaps.

She whirls round to face him. "What is that supposed to mean?"

He flashes up nose to nose with her, close enough to drink in perfume, lip cosmetic, hair product, her little shoulders heaving, cheeks flushed, her set eyes a match for her even more stubborn mouth, one eyebrow arching, those arms coming up round her chest once more, and don't think he doesn't notice you pushing up just enough to spill your breasts from that flimsy little neckline,  _love_.

"Well, let's see," he says, putting a finger to his chin. "Who was it, just yesterday, who had her lashes going like she was bloody trying to take flight with them in the direction of that man who delivered the new drapes?"

"I was  _thanking_ him. Maybe you should have paid more attention to that part instead of whatever you think my eyelashes were supposedly doing. Manners count, you know. Like the ones that would prevent you from just barging uninvited into people's private hotel rooms?"

"You think I don't recognize all your little tricks, Caroline? Who spent a year on the receiving end of those lashes, every time her bloody friends needed a pair of breasts flashed in my direction until whatever ridiculous assassination plot of the week they were cooking up had been seen through to its inevitable failure of a conclusion?"

"Ok, well you were flirting with that little man ho!"

"I was not!" he snaps. "I was giving him instructions as to which target he should strategically murder next!"

"With  _dimples_?" she yells.

"Well, who was it said the flies come more willingly to honey than to vinegar?"

"Oh my  _God_ \- like you have even one freaking  _ounce_ of understanding of what it is to try and bend people to your will by being  _nice_ to them!"

"You know who didn't constantly snipe at me and talk back any time I tried to extend an olive branch?"

"Well here is the world's tiniest violin playing the world's saddest song, Klaus, because I'm sure it's been so beyond unbelievably hard, murdering your way through everyone who didn't bow down and lick your obviously superior feet, the stupid peons. So thank  _God_ for Tim and his freaky porn whisperer skills, to comfort you in your time of need."

"Do you ever find yourself wondering if perhaps silence is a virtue after all?"

" _No_."

"Right." He smiles tightly. "Ask a stupid question."

"Do you know what else is a stupid question? Ask me what I think about the wisdom of making you almost completely indestructible. Then ask me if I'd like to drown you in my bathtub right now!" she shrieks.

"Water does at least have quite a muffling effect. Let's give it a go, shall we, love?"

There is a pause, two heartbeats long.

The slow unfurling of Caroline's arms.

The rushing of his blood inside veins, ears, throat.

She shoves him back into the wall so hard she cracks one of his ribs, his jacket gone in a blink, her lips suddenly vicious against his own, their teeth nearly scraping, her tongue hot, his hands brutal, her shirt giving way loudly beneath his fingers, his belt taking with it one of the loops of his trousers as she yanks his hips forward into her own-

"Caroline-"

"Shh; don't talk," she says, and she kisses him into obedience, digging her nails into his shoulders, his scalp, his back, nipping with her fangs at his neck, giving his ear a teasing pass with her tongue, and now a sudden heave of her little arms, and she forces him down onto the settee he has run up against, straddling him as he falls, her hands separating his shirt noisily down the middle.

She tastes his stomach, his nipples, his collarbones, lingers over the kiss she presses to the corner of his mouth, works her way over his chin, onto his lips, the bridge of his nose, forehead, scalp line, crown of his head, and then she merely sits for a moment, nose burrowed into his hair, and she very gently brings one hand up, to stroke the strands at the nape of his neck.

She leans back just a little to unsnap her bra.

He sits up.

She kisses him so hard she forces his head back onto the arm of the settee.

* * *

He remembers the first time the little Bennett witch smiled at him.

Is that sentimental of him?

He doesn't know. He buried that round the same time Nik buried Mother.

Or at least his recognition of it. You don't get very far, stopping to linger over every little twinge.

But anyway.

She wasn't very long dead (or perhaps she was; who can tell, in a place which never exchanges sun for moon, leaf for corpse, grass for ice), and she was wandering about with this rather moony look on her face (death is still a novelty for some, you see), and for a while he merely followed her, for what reason he is still not sure, but she brought him to his knees once, and anything which can cut from beneath them the legs of Mikaelsons is rather worth a peek, if you ask him, and so there he was, padding about on his soft panther tiptoes, his head cocked to that precise angle of the calculating predator, when suddenly she stopped, and she turned round, and she sent him a blast to drive the very breath from lungs which still instinctively gasped for it.

"Stop following me," she snapped, and if that blast to drive the very breath from lungs which have no need of it but go on craving it all the same wasn't enough, she spiked through his temple a migraine to bring the gods themselves to their knees.

And he said-

It doesn't matter, actually.

It's under a bit of murk, to be honest.

But he remembers it was a bit cheeky, a touch clever, a lot crude, and round him the wind suddenly pulled itself back from the bent limbs of her collateral damage and the migraine slowly drew from his temples the fever sweat of this witchy malaise, and he spit onto the ground a very moist breath, planting his palms in the grass, vomit in his nose, belly in his throat-

And she laughed.

She had a nice laugh.

Sometimes that's all it takes.

The first spark, if ignored, may smolder into ash with nothing more than a few pitiful flicks of the flame which stretches itself out for a bit of oxygen, desperate as a man for its survival.

But he was dead, she was pretty, why not set his lips to the cinders.

He thought it would hurt less, this time round.

Dead men know the anesthetic of the grave, which keeps from their nerves the sting of the maggots at their arms, the worms in their eyes, the beetles round their feet.

Not so their hearts.

He supposes there is no frost which sets itself to this particular organ, unstopped by sword, slowed not by dagger, impervious to stake.

On nights Caroline does not stick round, he curls up in Nik's bed, and he watches his brother sleep, and on nights his side has been taken up by this girl who has begun to nudge him right out of Nik's heart, he curls up next to the little witch who still adheres to her human cycles, and oh, yes, it hurts.

People don't often know that about him.

But haven't we all a reputation to wrap round the holes?

* * *

He finds her in a tree one day, sitting near the top, legs swinging, hands clasped between her knees.

She is looking very far off over his head. "I went to see Elena today. I didn't mean to. It just…happened. She was doing ok, you know?"

Yes, he knows.

She rubs a hand across her eyes.

He opens his mouth.

"Don't, Kol. I don't want a joke, or some innuendo, or to act out fairytales like we're on some kind of  _playground_. I'm never going to get to do the things they can. I'm never going to do…anything. And I am trying, to reconcile myself to that. But I'm just not that selfless, to be glad I died for them." She rubs her eyes again. "I'm not sorry they're safe, and they're happy, because I still love them, even if I'm here, and they're there." She shrugs, and she tries out a smile, very tremulous, dangling from her lips like at any moment it might slip, and shatter round the edges.

But you were eighteen.

He understands.

"What do you want, Bonnie?" he asks gently.

She flicks her eyes down at him.

She takes a shuddery breath.

"I guess what I really just need is…a hug."

"I'm not very good at that."

Her smile is not cruel.

What does that even look like?

"I know," she says, and she gives her legs another swing. "Tell me something instead. Something I don't know or wouldn't guess about you."

He once believed in gods that were not Nik.

He killed a woman with hair like his mother.

He held his sister's hand for an entire London night.

"I love Brussels sprouts."

"I do too, actually."

"Really?"

"No. Nobody loves them, Kol. But did you ever try cottage cheese and applesauce? It's a lot better than it sounds."

"That's a sin against nature, Bennett."

"That's a little judgmental, coming from you."

"There are some things even a monster can't allow to pass unremarked." He leans his shoulder against the trunk of the tree, and crosses his legs at the ankle. "I let a meal go once, because he looked like my brother Henrik."

Nik couldn't bury him; Bekah had to take him away, stumbling over his own feet.

So he stayed, and he tossed the black earth onto poor Henrik's torn head, and he blinked a few times, because Father was watching, and then he crept away in secret, to put away his grief in a pile of dirt he lay sticky with sobs in for a very long time, and one day two hundred years later, he shot out his hand into a flock of boys and came out holding one with his dead brother's face, and he held him for just a moment, and then he snapped open his fingers.

Nik would have eaten the boy for the same reason he let him go.

Don't get him wrong; it was a fleeting moment, not a very touching one, when you understand that he strode into Constantinople's center mere minutes later and he set to flame the convents not eaten by the pillage of Crusaders, but he had it, and he sometimes thinks back on this boy with his brother's face who if not snuffed by flames has been put to death by the weight of centuries, and he smiles.

"I was going to adopt," Bonnie tells him. "When it was time for me to have kids." She shrugs. "Because a kid shouldn't have to know yet that sometimes you're just not wanted."

"But sometimes you are," he says with just enough sincerity in his voice that she does not take him seriously at all.

* * *

"You don't look very good," he tells Bonnie one day, sliding down onto the ground beside her.

"Thanks."

She draws her knees up to her chest. "It's weird- I mean, it's not like we can get sick, obviously. But I just feel…off."

"Do you know what takes care of that?" he asks, leaning his head in toward her own.

"No it doesn't."

"It was worth a try."

"Of all the stalkers I could have picked up-"

"You never thought you'd get so lucky?"

"That's exactly what I was going to say! How did you know?"

"Well, four score and one thousand years ago, there was a baby of exceptional beauty and obvious intelligence born to the Mikaelson clan-"

"You already told me this story."

"But it never gets old."

"Especially when you embellish it a little more every time."

"Parts of it. Not other parts." He looks down with a suggestive smile and an eyebrow wiggle.

"Ew."

* * *

The door opens, the door shuts.

Thus is her goddamned life now.

You will never understand monotony until you have been stripped of that unknown hole at the end of the road and tossed onto the next path over, which winds on eternally.

Klaus enters one morning when she is three feet into the wall with her boot.

He takes her roughly by the shoulder and shoves her down onto the bed, and she bounces once, uses this momentum to snap a kick at his face, and with a casual flicker of his hand, he catches her by the ankle, and dangles her just shy of the mattress. "Let's not be like that, shall we? I'm just trying to have a nice little chat with someone whom I assumed would welcome the company."

"Fuck you."

He smiles. "Do you know- I like your spirit. It's going to hold up quite well, isn't it, once I've freed Caroline of that little spell you cast?"

"Yeah, how's that going?"

She watches the smile recede into his lips.

He drops her.

"What are your friends up to, hmm, little Sophie? There's quite the ruckus going on, I'm told. Can't quite put my finger on it."

"How in the hell would I know?" she snaps.

"Because I assume there were contingency plans all over the place, and that you had your sticky little fingers in them all, at some point or another."

She sits slowly forward, and she clasps her shaking hands between her knees.

Think you're the only one with a smile, Mikaelson?

Here.

Have one of her best.

"And even if I did, what are you going to do? Torture the information out of me? How do you think Caroline would feel about that? But I'll give you a hint for free. I mean, I don't know anything for sure- the dragon's kind of got me shut up in the fucking tower right now. But I know that at one point, we thought it might be nice to have a family reunion. That's kind of cryptic, isn't it. How many Mikaelsons are dead, again? Let's see…uh…oh, fuck, I don't know- I can't keep track of you all."

She's never seen someone lose their color quite so fast.

That's nice.

She likes that.

"You're talking about Mikael, aren't you," he whispers.

She shrugs, putting her hands into the motion. "Am I? What do I know?"

A blink brings him within half an inch of her nose, and she rocks back, bile in her throat, a storm in her belly, the jingling of his necklaces the only sound that exists in this sudden vacuum into which she has been thrust, everything else suctioned away.

She focuses on the only line his forehead will ever show.

She tongues the dryness from her lips.

"Have you ever heard of Katerina Petrova?"

She says nothing.

"Long story short, she thwarted my will, I murdered her entire family and sent her fleeing on ahead of me, looking over her shoulder for five hundred years."

"I don't have any family left."

"Oh that's not true, now is it," he says, scrunching up his brow almost sympathetically. "You always pick them up along the way, over the centuries." He drops his head, and he smiles. "But what if I told you that every time you make a friend, every time you take a lover, you make a connection- out from the shadows steps that creature whom your mother warned you about, and her mother before her, and her mother before her? She did tell you about me, didn't she? I'm quite the bogeyman of the supernatural community, I'm told." His dimples deepen. "Do you recall any of the tales? They're all true, I can assure you. In fact, some have been watered down, to make them a bit more palatable for the masses. Apparently there are some things you just can't repeat."

"I don't know what's going on. I just tossed that out there to-"

"You didn't just 'toss it out there', sweetheart. You wanted to shake me up. We all get our kicks on others' fear, don't we? That's not even something that shows up when your new teeth drop. It's one of the few human traits you'll still cling to, a thousand years from now. But let's not linger over existential chitchat." He runs his hand almost tenderly up her throat, and presses his thumb and his pointer finger lightly to either side of her neck, just below the jaw line.

"You can't do anything to me," she chokes out.

"I can do whatever I like. I have forever. A spell, however, does not. All things end, Sophie Devereaux. Except me."

He straightens himself with her neck still in his hand, pulling her up with him. "Now back to Mikael."

"There was talk at one point, about seeing if we could bring him back. Just as a last resort, if we didn't think we had any other options. We didn't really want anymore Originals running around the city. I don't know if that's what's going on, Klaus. If you haven't noticed, I've been a little fucking out of touch with my coven."

"Which internal organ is your favorite?" he asks abruptly.

"What?" she hisses, her heart hammering against his thumb.

He smiles and leans in to nearly touch his nose to her own. "I'll let you keep it. As thanks. And a souvenir."

He is gone in another blink.

The door slams behind him.

* * *

"Elijah," he snaps into his mobile, his boots squelching against the layer of wet southern winter puddled round the gutters, his toes sending into flurries bits of rubbish, leftover parade confetti, chips of ice not yet succumbed. "Get back to the house.  _Now_."

He ends the call with a jab of his thumb.

He dials Bekah once more.

"Pick up your bloody  _phone_!" he shouts, startling from a nearby alley some couple necking in the shadows, and into her voicemail he is once more dumped, her message not nearly so loud in his ear as his heart.

He squeezes his eyes shut for just a moment before his next call, hits the one on his screen, tries not to bloody plead her name into the mouthpiece. "Caroline."

"You've reached Caroline Forbes! I'm not available right now, but if you leave me a message, I'll get back to you as soon as possible! Unless this is Klaus, because we're still technically fighting right now, which means I have to make you sweat a little, wondering if I'm even going to get back to you at all. So there."

He hurls his mobile into the side of the nearest building.

* * *

"Nik's got his panties in a real twist tonight." Rebekah gives her phone a tap of her finger.

"He's called me approximately eight gajillion times in the last five minutes. I  _told_ him we were working."

Rebekah smiles nastily, and tucks her phone into the pocket of her jacket. "Right. About that. Don't think I'm doing this out of any loyalty to you, or Nik. You just so happen to be slightly less annoying than him right now. That's the only reason I'm here."

"Whatever. You don't have to like me to compel uncooperative informants. So get to it." She makes a little shooing motion with her hand toward the reception desk of the hotel.

"I don't take orders from anyone, let alone  _you_."

"Well maybe you should  _start_. We'd get a lot more done around here if you weren't lounging around all day, flipping your hair and trying to decide if your shirt clashes with the murder you just committed."

"Don't talk to me like we're equals, Caroline."

"Sorry! Did I forget the 'scraping peasant' tone in my voice again?"

"If you could please try and remember it next time, but I won't hold my breath for a little spark to ignite through all the blonde."

"You're blonde too!"

"Yes, well, some of us are fortunate enough to not fall prey to the pitfalls of stereotypes. Also, I don't feel like compelling him right now. He's greasy."

"I didn't say have his freaking oily-haired demon spawn, I said go ask him if he's got anything new for us, and then remind him that he's never seen or spoken to us before in his life while I go look for the janitor!"

"No. I don't think so."

"Then what are you even  _doing here_?"

"Well certainly not-"

The front door splinters inward with a loud crash that whirls them both around, and on the breath of this cool December night strides Klaus, his face thunderous, his hand on her elbow in the half a second it takes him to cross the lobby, his other hand coming up to jerk Rebekah roughly toward him by the shoulder.

"What the  _hell_ , Klaus-"

"We're leaving."

"Nik, if you don't stop manhandling me, I'll take whatever Caroline's left of your testicles, and I'll spit them on little sticks and serve them as shish kabobs at our next party."

"I said  _we're leaving_ ," he snaps, yanking them both toward the little breeze curling in through the ruined door, his breath like smoke before him, his fingers digging into her forearm. "And in future, if it's not too much trouble, perhaps you could answer your bloody phones!"

"Hello! We're kind of busy right now!"

"No, right now we're all headed home. You can pick Stefan up along the way, Caroline."

"Get  _off_ me, Nik, or I'll-"

"Mikael is coming," he interrupts, and Rebekah shuts her mouth so abruptly Caroline hears her teeth click together.


	3. Part Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: So as you can see, this entry in the series got completely and totally out of hand. This is the final part to this particular one-shot (thank God, right, and STFU, bitch, kthx), and I just want to issue a few warnings, and to also tell you all APPRECIATE MY GODDAMNED DEDICATION because I researched both weird sex and the history of dildos for this one-shot. I'd like to say I'm shitting you. I'd like to say a lot of things. (And now you want to know just precisely what you've gotten yourself into with this fic.)
> 
> This part is actually more flashback than anything, and this third part will heavily feature the Originals, particularly Kol. Klaus' perspective does pop up in the flashback, but only briefly. I wanted this to be Kol's story because he never really did get one in the show, and because Klaus has had plenty of screen time in this fic, and it won't hurt him to take a step back for just a bit. He doesn't agree, but not everything is about him. There is Klaroline, but not much, since much of this part takes place in 1915. Klaus' attitude as it relates to love in these historical sections does, however, in a way pertain to his present-day relationship with Caroline, because it shows how very far he's come, and how really sort of astonishing it is that he opened himself up in such a way. So even when there's no Klaroline, there's Klaroline. Get what I'm saying? You'll be back to your regularly-schedule Klaroline in the next one-shot, although there will be lots of interaction between the family as well. This is, after all, an alternative take on TO.
> 
> Be aware that there are several fairly graphic sexual acts in this part, and also that if you thought this series was gay before, lololololol you ain't seen nothin' yet.
> 
> Just a few notes:
> 
> Emma Johnson was an actual madame in New Orleans' Storyville, and she did indeed host 'sex circuses' in her brothel. I could not really find any details on the acts performed during these circuses (nothing, anyway, beyond mentions of them featuring both the prostitutes from the brothel as well as animals, so maybe it's a good thing I didn't stumble across anything too specific), but the impression I got was that it was basically just a bunch of sexual acts performed for a large crowd.
> 
> Lulu White was also another madame of Storyville.
> 
> The 'Channel' Tim talks about at one point refers to New Orleans' Irish Channel, a working-class neighborhood where, surprisingly, many Irish lived. (New Orleans being a port city, a lot of Irish congregated there during the large waves of immigration following the Great Famine.)
> 
> Also, harmonica players are sometimes called harp players. I just wanted to mention that really quickly because I use the terms interchangeably in one scene, and I thought that might be confusing. (Until I started reading up on harmonicas, I had no idea they were also known as harps. That conjures up an image of a completely different instrument for me.)

* * *

**New Orleans, 1915**

Death is only a joke.

Most everything is, if you look at it long enough.

For instance:

Once there was a boy called Kol, who wanted to be included. For quite a long time, it was very sad, watching him laugh until the tears in his eyes could be attributed to mirth.

But tilt your head a bit. Let the fog of a decade or two wrap its muffler round this one very small tragedy amongst so many greater others. Do you see how it all recedes? What cause may stand before the might of a tide such as this, what death can not be scrubbed from your heart, how long can a friendship gone to pieces prickle its shards within your chest?

You take a breath.

You try out a laugh.

A century from now, who will remember, darling.

That's funny, isn't it?

A century from now, he will still be a boy who wants to be included.

But nobody remembers that.

It's a very small story, it's bumped up against a lot of others, it has always become snarled with and trod down by the tomes of better tales.

But this is how all stories go.

For instance:

(He's repeating himself, isn't he? Nik says he does that sometimes too.)

You remember the start of the Great War, the hot spray of an Archduke's life, the rattling of guns, the bombers with their bellies open to the clouds, that first red year of death upon death.

But do you recall the boy whose mother begged him to stay, who marched off with her tears and his mingled on his lips, who tasted salt for the entire three months of war which are all the fates sometimes allot to boys who play soldier?

Neither does he.

That's what happened to his story, too. Someone pressed it flat beneath Nik's lingering issues and Bekah's haughty tantrums and Elijah's quiet ruthlessness, because these are the things that go together, and boys who want to be included are by their nature just beyond the circle, pressing their nose to the glass.

But they have a one-liner for every occasion, these boys who are not allowed their dimensions.

And when they descend the stairs to a dinner party whose invitation was surely an afterthought, for an ill-mannered ogre like them, they put a bounce in their step, a smile on their face, a rejoinder on their tongue.

They snap the bowtie of their third eldest brother and they leave behind a spitty kiss on the cheek of their horrified sister, and for the last of this circle that shored itself up with a promise no one saw fit to bestow on this one-dimension boy with his flat paper smile and his feelings that do not exist (just ask anyone), there is a slap to both ass cheeks hard enough to mark the skin beneath.

Nik adjusts his tie.

Bekah wipes her cheek.

Elijah straightens his suit.

He smiles and with his bare fingers samples three of the dishes steaming on the table.

"Kol-"

"Just let him be, Elijah. If you tell him to stop, half an instant of your back to this table and you'll turn round to find dinner on the floor, the ceiling, Nik's hair. And then what will you tell the guests I hear arriving now? Sorry; change of plans. Let's all pop out for a hamburger, shall we?"

Nik smiles at him.

That's something, isn't it?

He has come home five days in a row to an empty house and an emptier bed, but it's something.

Isn't it?

He smiles back.

He sneaks a custard dish of O positive from one of the trays and he tosses it back with an eye bat from Bekah and a sigh from Elijah, who tightens his jaw and steps forward to welcome the first of the guests ushered in by the maid.

"He'll pop a vein before this dinner is through," Nik predicts.

"Do you want to help me poke it?" he asks, lifting an eyebrow.

Nik smiles again, very slyly, his dimples flaring up.

"We are willing to consider a potential alliance, in the interest of restoring peace to the city," Elijah is saying in the foyer. "If you would all please take a seat, I believe four courses will give us plenty of time to come to an arrangement upon which we can all agree."

'Lijah's got bloody place cards for them each.

He goes round the table switching them all up, nudging a silverware setting here, upsetting a glass there, prodding the lids on all the platters just half an inch off course, Nik watching with a snicker, Bekah with an eye roll.

He sits himself at the head of the table and crosses his legs primly, folding his hands on his top knee.

Elijah silently sets everything to rights with a frown and a side eye.

The guests flare out to take their places.

Elijah remains standing, waiting for everyone to get themselves settled.

Nik seats himself three chairs down, Bekah on his right.

The guests rustle themselves in close to the table, bellies to cloth.

"Shall we?" Elijah asks, and he lifts the lid from the nearest platter with a flourish.

He tilts his head and glares down the table at Nik.

"I'm sorry, Elijah, I couldn't resist."

"Is that-"

"The baritone who gave such an abysmal performance last night? Yes," Nik cuts in before Bekah can finish her question. "I thought his vocal cords should at least be good for something. They're in the soup. Very tender. Bit of a lamb-like texture to them."

Elijah flicks the apple Nik has wedged into the head's mouth down the table.

He catches it.

Nik lifts another lid to reveal another head, pries free a second apple, tosses it to him, receives the first apple in turn, and now they begin to juggle the two, quite proficiently, if you ask him (and he looks simply marvelous mid-performance, just ask the brunette in the green with her eyes to his unfairly handsome face), a few of the guests laughing.

Nik adds a third apple.

"In the past three days we have experienced a surge heretofore unseen in the recent violence between the Atreaux coven and some of the local vampires which has begun to spill over from the French Quarter and infest the rest of the city. This, of course, is unacceptable. Niklaus has made you all aware of our family's difficulties with our father, who could potentially be drawn to such a display. It is in the best interests of us all to ensure this doesn't happen."

"That's just lovely, Elijah. You are a born orator, brother."

"A man of unspeakable eloquence," Nik puts in, adding a fourth apple.

"I heard once a siren tried to lure him to his watery death and she left the experience with a pocket square and the lord and savior Gucci in her heart." He tosses his apples to Nik.

"I heard once he talked a prince into war because the opposing side wore white after Labor Day." Nik lobs the apples back.

"I heard once a girl had two idiot brothers who were drowned in vocal cord soup because they couldn't shut their mouths and let a lady enjoy her glass of b positive."

Nik dimples.

He puts one of the apples on his head and juggles the other three without dislodging the fourth, heaves them one at a time across the table to Nik, raises his arms in triumph, apple bobbing on his head. "Do you know what would liven up this party? An orgy. Nik, where's your little boyfriend? I've always wanted to see him naked. And no Marcel- you can't have an orgy without Marcel. His trousers have got an entire-"

"Enough," Elijah says firmly.

"-elephant trunk in them. Once he let me touch it."

"He did not," Nik says, catching one of the apples behind his back. He whips all three over the table.

"Just because he doesn't want you anywhere near it doesn't mean I am under the same restrictions. I'm very pretty, you know." He flicks his tongue.

"You pretended to fall and caught yourself on his penis," Bekah snaps.

He points at Nik. "You didn't think of that. What good have all your fancy books really done you?"

Nik lifts his hands to receive the apples. He lets them make three revolutions and then he begins to toss them once more across the table, and when a look from Elijah bends him snickering over the table, he fumbles the first of Nik's tosses and it thumps solidly off Bekah's forehead, dropping with a rustle into her lap.

She is behind him in a blink.

A fork to either hand pins them to the table, and in another blink he looks up to see Nik similarly afflicted, both his palms flat against the tablecloth, the silverware like flag poles through all the ligaments of his hands.

Elijah delicately dabs his mouth with a napkin. "Shall we move on?"

"I'll have to think on it, Elijah. I'm a bit  _divided_ at the moment," Nik says, and he holds up one hand with its wide split down the middle, wiggling his fingers so that the ligaments give a little dance between the ragged lips of this wound.

"The next one is going in your  _eye_ , Nik."

* * *

In Lafitte's there is the smell of blood, but no Nik.

He thought he'd try anyway.

He knows it's quite pathetic of him. He is 919, he fought a lot of wars, he bedded a lot of women, he drank from a queen, he seduced her king, he took his bare feet and he applied them to the winters of Russia like they were only a mild spring morning, a bit damp, not terribly unbearable, and here he sniffs round old haunts as though he might stir up a bit of his brother's love with the dust.

He recognizes the profile of this little plaything of Nik's, watching the fights from a bar stool in the corner, hat on his head, jacket over the bar, feet up on the bottom rung of the stool.

"I haven't seen you around lately," he says, sliding onto the stool beside the boy. "Don't tell me you had a lover's spat with Nik."

Tim flicks a side look at him.

One corner of his mouth ticks up just a bit, not very humorlessly. "You have to be worth a rat's ass to warrant something like that."

"Behold: he does speak."

The boy ducks his head and runs a hand across the back of his neck.

"Nik's found a new toy, has he?"

You know, darling, he can relate.

You might not know that about him.

"I don't know what Klaus is up to these days. He's got his sister, I suppose."

The circle is complete, mate.

Sorry about that.

Perhaps he can offer you the conciliatory companionship of the plucky sidekick and his armory of jokes which do not taste nearly so funny as they sound.

Tim swivels himself round toward the bar, leans one elbow against the wood. "Been thinking about fightin' him. He's been killin' most of his opponents." He points to the man in the chalk circle, mouth smeared red, hands smeared redder.

"And you think you'll be the one to take him down."

"No. That's why I'm thinking of fightin' him."

All of the silence which can be gathered in a room full of the shouts of gamblers and the screams of victims sieves itself down between them.

Tim gives a little humorless laugh. "That's quite an opener, isn't it?"

"Suicide is a very nice ice breaker."

You will try it over and over again. Sometimes it is boredom. More times it is not.

You see, you get one story, and perhaps it brushes others and perhaps it takes a chunk from history here and there, perhaps it gets its own taste of immortality in the pages of libraries, but still it is only one story, you get tired of it, you want to know something else, to sample from the words which have been written on the gates of the damned or the chariots of cherubs.

There are a finite number of emotions. You will cycle through joy and acceptance and land a million times on rejection and despair and if you have only one short generation to rifle these experiences, they are each of them still new, every time.

But you are only one lonely boy who took a dick up his ass among a society who not long ago burned to ash the sins of sodomists.

You have before you a thousand thousand generations of shame.

"Irish?" he asks, stealing a nip from the glass of whiskey someone abandoned to the ring.

"What?" Tim asks, taking off his hat to run one hand over his head.

"You're Irish. Originally." He takes a long sip. "I can hear it in your voice sometimes."

"Yeah. From Kerry. Took a ship over with me Ma when I was twelve. Tried to pick up an American accent when I came over. We get some of the English gentry in those fancy hotels; some of them don't want a Mick handling their luggage. Or, worse, they think it's all we're good for. Though here it doesn't really matter; sometimes I think half the city's made up of Irish."

He takes another sip. "Surely not all you're good for, darling." He winks.

Tim smiles just a little.

"So. Do you think you'll kill yourself?"

"I guess I wouldn't still be sitting here if I was going to, would I? If you're looking for attention you attempt it, if you want to do it, you do it."

"Nik's not got you all Romeo and Juliet, has he?"

Tim smiles again. "I'm just young. I'm not stupid."

He salutes with his glass. "They're the same thing, darling."

"Not stupid enough to not realize I'm the mouse, then. Or to kill myself over it."

He turns the glass in his hands.

Smarter than him, then, mate.

In 1716 he threw himself off a mountain.

He'll let you draw your own conclusions.

"What happened to your father, then?"

"Huh?"

"The man whose penis spit out a bit of you? You said you came over with your mother. Where was the other half of Tim?"

"Dead. He was a great admirer of Wolf Tone; caught the rebellion bug."

"The last true Irish rebellion was the Fenian Uprising, wasn't it? You're not old enough to have been put in your mother's belly by that time. Nik turned you in 1912? And you look- nineteen? Twenty?"

"Twenty-one. He turned me a few days after my birthday."

"So '91 would have been the year of your birth. The Uprising was in the '60s, wasn't it?"

Tim tips his head just a bit and pivots on his stool. "Were you there for it?"

"No. My last brush with the Irish was a bit of piracy back in the 1500s. Nik always liked Ireland, though. He's got a few books lying around. You're a very disobedient people. I like it."

The boy smiles. His nose wrinkles as he does it, the freckles bunch up on the bridge, and he sees the origination of Nik's little crush.

If Mother submerged them all in the blackest filth of everything cast off from the goodness of man, then at least Nik has got himself the good sense to surround himself with pretty little things.

"Da was killed in '92. Just because we aren't bristling with guns doesn't mean we're not butting heads with the British every few years or so. He got himself executed as a traitor to the crown; that's all Ma would ever really say about him."

He takes another drink, his eyes on the boy. "What happened to your Celtic spirit, darling? Haven't you got a kick in the teeth for Nik?"

Tim drops a hand down on his jacket and bunches the sleeve in his fingers.

He sets the glass down.

It is certainly true that love sometimes puts out our eyes and replaces truth with that rosy glass of the poets, who filter through rainbows this emotion that is more often an anvil than the bloody angel wings the prose of novelists awards to the densest of fools, the lover, but you have breathed the muck of Nik for three years, mate.

Nik lowers himself for no dalliance. He put his prick in you because there's a very nice pink to your cheeks and lashes to tinge Rebekah green with her envy, but you've a brain beneath your youth, else the papers'd have found you facedown in a gutter come your first path crossed with the second handsomest of the original monsters.

Didn't you see it coming?

But then.

He's 919.

He has ended precisely 304 searches for his brother just like this, in a drink, and though he does not wear his heart so plainly as this boy, he is just as surprised, every single time.

You just expect to receive it back, don't you?

Tim rubs his chin, working his jaw against his fingers. "You come for the fight?"

He swallows another sip. "I came for Nik, actually."

The boy looks at him. "Two idiots walk into a bar," he says, and his smile is too self-deprecating to wrinkle his nose this time, but it's still a very nice smile.

"He speaks and he jokes. Do you know, I bet without Nik around to muzzle you, you're fairly interesting? Come on; give us a quick rundown. I already know your age. Height? Favorite color? Penis size?"

Tim sits back and laughs at the last, looking down at his hands. "6'3; red; big enough to choke your brother,  _mate_."

He slaps the counter with his hand and points at the boy. "He's saucy, too. I like that in a man."

They let the roar of the crowd overtake them, and for a moment Tim swivels his head round to watch the two opponents circling one another in the ring, and then he reaches down into the pocket of his trousers, and he unearths a watch he opens with a noisy click.

"Yours, or have you picked up Nik's little habit of pinching pocket watches? Has he ever shown you his collection?"

Tim snaps it closed. "He hasn't shown me any part of him that isn't something I'm supposed to put in my mouth."

He slides his drink down the counter.

Tim lifts an eyebrow.

He flicks his tongue obscenely. "It's got me all over it. What other reason do you need? Have a sip, darling."

"I'm off, actually. It's midnight; I promised a few friends we'd have a drink together." He slides off the stool and tosses his jacket over his arm, adjusting his cap.

He slings the jacket over his shoulder, and lingers awkwardly for just a moment, pressing his lips together, sliding his hands into his pockets.

He slips one of them free and holds it out in front of him.

Do you know-

He can't really remember the last time he's clasped hands with a man so innocently, merely to shake down through his wrist a hearty farewell.

The last of the chasteness goes from your touch round about the second century or so.

But he meets this boy palm to palm with hardly a squeeze to dent his fingers, and he lets his smile blossom naturally, without that extra bit of cheek that drops the trousers of men and women alike, and it's actually quite nice.

Imagine that.

* * *

On the deaf ears of another empty house falls his dramatic reading of Eljah's copy of  _De Profundis_ , only funny thing is that ten pages in this bit of fluff that was supposed to offer up a bit of florid juiciness for his amusement gets its hooks in him, and pulls him down to be quiet in a chair he doesn't leave for a very long time.

From the seat of his shame Oscar Wilde pens all the yearning he wasted on his gay young lover while from outside the bars civilization puts its shoulder to his pedestal and tips it over with a good riddance to that, and what isn't deliciously nasty about that?

But here is what the book tells him:

But you, like myself, have had a terrible tragedy in your life, though one of an entirely opposite character of mine. Do you want to learn what it was? It was this. In you Hate was always stronger than Love. Your hatred of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped, o'erthrew, and overshadowed your love of me. You did not realize that there is no room for both passions in the soul. They cannot live together in that fair carven house.

And he thinks, of course, as he always does, of Nik.

And so when he puts the book down and he trots up the stairs to set to flame three paintings of Nik's (a ship, an ugly woman, some flowery landscape- ask him not what he destroys, darling, he cares only that each of them are Nik's children, and he loves them equally as he never loved his siblings), he stops when the frames have got only a touch of black round their corners, and he puts them out.

He sits down on the window ledge.

Is love a sword, that it might be taken up by a valiant knight-errant and put through the stomach of Hate?

He tried that, you know.

Hate casts a very long shadow, and love is not so very bright a sun as you might expect.

But he puts the fires out.

He puts the fires out, and when his brother comes to the door at last, he has a smile on his face that is not mocking, and he asks Nik how his day went, and if he's up for a round of cards or a night out on the town, but Nik's got Bekah of course, and she's waiting, don't do anything he wouldn't do, little brother, and don't pat him on the bloody  _head_ , Nik, he is not your  _dog_.

Don't do anything you wouldn't, Nik, is that right?

He aims to please, doesn't he, little Kol Mikaelson, your trained monkey?

There is not much Nik wouldn't do.

Chief among them is to react rationally to a poke to the feelings he is not supposed to have.

He has heard (through rumors of course, because to what else is he supposed to put his ear- an echoing bloody house?) that Elijah and Nik have got themselves a little team put together for the witches of New Orleans, and it just so happens (isn't this a happy coincidence) that he has to his name five very sharp stakes.

What's that?

Five team members?

Darling, this is surely Fate at work with her nimble hands!

* * *

Lest you think he has taken this story and he has shooed from its pages the protagonists to whom he is supposed to cling in sidekick obscurity, be assured that your main darlings are quite present.

In fact one of them is kicking the shit out of him at this very moment.

Nik has got that natural superiority of all elder siblings, and to back up his faster fists he has the passion of the quite foamy rage he has worked himself into, but he's a biter.

He sinks his teeth into Nik's hand and when his big brother rears back with a cry, he elbows Nik across the jaw and pushes him down the stairs.

"I left you a present, Nik. You didn't like it?" he asks, wiping his face as he descends.

Nik has him in a headlock before he is three steps down.

"You don't  _touch_ my things, Kol. You do not break my toys, you will not disturb any more of mine and Elijah's plans. Do you want Father breathing down our necks?" Nik asks right in his ear, crushing him back against his chest, his forearm cutting into his throat.

He'd settle just for you, Nik.

Or Bekah.

Or Elijah.

He's not even picky at this point, brother.

You know about that, don't you, Nik? Mother left you behind. You lashed out. You took whatever you could get.

You don't understand why his throat keeps working against your arm, why he posed those five vampires round your studio like it was some great joke, why he followed Bekah and Elijah for six blocks and he extracted himself from their hair only when Bekah gave him a swat like he was some sort of fly, still shit-speckled-

Nik-

Does he have to say it?

"Are you  _listening_?" Nik snaps in his ear.

"I'm not sure- does your voice sound like a very high-pitched whining?"

Nik boxes his ear and lets him go. "Behave yourself, Kol."

Love thy brother, Nik.

Is that so bloody  _hard_?

Is he really such a gnat?

Nik?

Don't answer that.

* * *

Bekah is home but Nik and Elijah are not when the front door swings open and Tim lets himself into the foyer.

He flashes from the parlor to lean himself against the wall nearest the boy, putting both hands in his trouser pockets. "Nik isn't here."

Tim leaves the door open behind him, mirroring his pose, both his hands going to his own pockets, his shoulders hunching forward awkwardly. "I was, uh…I was looking for you, actually. I was wondering if you'd like to come down to the Channel, maybe have a drink?"

He holds out his hands to either side. "I haven't eaten yet. I could go for a blonde."

"I actually was thinking like a, uh, a Guinness."

"Well that's not quite as exciting."

"That's all right. I just- I thought I would ask." Tim shifts his hands in his pockets, presses his lips, looks down at his feet.

"I could pick something up on the way?"

Don't look so surprised, darling.

Loneliness makes the best of bedfellows.

Well.

Perhaps not the best. Certainly the most passionate, though.

Do you want to know a secret?

There is something that never goes out of a man even long after he has molted skin for scales.

If you hold out your hand, and you whisper him softly to it, and you pet him as he takes his first tentative nibble, he will hound your heels for all your days.

See how long he has followed the brother who used to sing him down to sleep, who died on the point of his father's sword, who never did rise again.

Perhaps you did it only to battle the isolation that makes prison cells of days that you have not yet begun to understand are without limits; perhaps this is about the self, as most things are; perhaps you could mount upon his face any old not-nearly-so-handsome mug and be satisfied with half the wit and intellect, but thanks, mate.

For thinking of him.

You would be the first.

* * *

"What shall we do with a drunken sailor, what shall we do with a drunken sailor, what shall we do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning? Put him in the long boat until he's sober, put him in the boat until he's sober, put him in the boat until he's sober; weigh heigh and up she rises, weigh heigh and up she rises, weigh heigh and up she rises, early in the morning!"

He claps out the next part of the beat from his perch on the bar, his foot joining in, and now a man in the corner starts in with his fiddle, a second with his harmonica, and Tim hops up to join him on the bar, mug in his hands, the head of his Guinness in a moustache round his lips.

"Put him in the back of a paddy wagon, put him in the back of a paddy wagon, put him in the back of a paddy wagon; weigh heigh and up she rises, weigh heigh and up she rises, weigh heigh and up she rises, early in the morning!"

The man on his fiddle drunkenly fumbles one of his slurs.

"Ah!" Tim yells. "Drink, ya' fucker!"

Someone holds a mug to his lips.

He drinks as his bow darts on.

"Put him in bed with the captain's daughter!" Kol screams, and a cheer goes up.

"Put him in the bed with the captain's daughter, put him in the bed with the captain's daughter, put him in the bed with the captain's daughter; weigh heigh and up she rises, weigh heigh and up she rises, weigh heigh and up she rises early in the morning!"

Tim sloshes beer down himself, laughing till his cheeks go red as his lips, and now they link arms and skip a little drunken circle down the bar, beer flying everywhere, the harp player taking his mouth from the air holes to belt out a laugh that nearly tips him off his stool, the fiddler fumbling again, and with another hoot of "Drink!" he takes a second sip, misses a note, drinks again, his technique gone wholly to hell now, the entire bar roaring, all of them off-beat, Tim stumbling nearly off the edge of the bar, mug of Guinness still in his hand, Kol holding him up by the elbow, the fiddler trying to rescue his tune, the harp player surrendered to his whiskey-

"What's the next fuckin' line?" someone yells, and this too sends the bar into hysterics and Tim down onto his ass.

He takes the mug from Tim and smashes it on the floor.

There is another cheer.

He holds his arms over his head.

"Rocky Road To Dublin!" someone shrieks at the fiddler, who salutes with his bow and blows the rosin from his instrument.

He nudges Tim as a few shaky notes drift out from the strings. "Five dollars and a kiss says none of you can beat my friend here in a round of arm wrestling."

"You can keep your kiss, lad, but five goddamned dollars on those skinny little sticks?"

"I'll take 'em both!" another man yells. "Another pint and you'll be just as pretty as me wife!"

"Another pint and I'll be prettier than them both, you drunken fuck!" the patron beside him roars, puckering his lips beneath his ratty beard.

"Come on! Step right up! Who shall take his humiliation first?"

"I think Tim's a fair bet; he's about to take a nosedive off that bar," the harp player yells from his stool.

He catches the boy's elbow again. "He's all right, darling. Do we have a first challenger?"

A large man sets down his mug and shoves back his chair. "I hate to make babies cry, but that's half my wage for the week. Ought to bring your rich friends round more often, Tim." He pulls a seat up to the bar.

Tim hops down to set his elbow on the bar, angling his hip into the edge and extending his hand, his long fingers still damp with his drink.

The man wraps his palm round Tim's.

"Ready?"

The fiddler plays a quick little reel.

Tim flexes his fingers.

His opponent looks over his shoulder with a smile.

Someone salutes with their drink.

"Go."

It's over in merely a second, of course.

He leans in close to the man, giving him the full force of this smile he has learned from Nik. "You were saying?"

He purses his lips playfully.

The crowd gives a loud jeer. "Your pinky finger's bigger round than him, Pat!"

"This is what happens when a man's got no wife!" someone laughs. "Come on, Tim, give him your off arm! Give the man a chance!"

Tim drops his left hand and holds out his right.

They both nod to Kol.

"All right, gentlemen- have at it."

He hears the frantic struggle of Tim's challenger, the strain of his heart against throat, chest, wrists, the grinding of his teeth, the little groan in the back of his throat, the sliding of finger against finger, elbow on wood, every pore of him gushing up his embarrassment to make its way in shiny rivulets down his forehead-

Tim slams his hand down onto the bar.

The bar cheers.

Kol holds up the man's arm and shakes it cheerfully. "For being such a good sport about your humiliating defeat at the hands of such a pretty young thing," he says, and yanks the man in for a wet kiss.

There is another cheer as the man jerks backward, spluttering as he goes, free arm coming up to wipe from his lips the damp imprint of another man's mouth.

"How was it?" the harp player wants to know.

"Sweeter than your wife's!" he hollers back.

Tim slumps against the bar, letting his head fall to the arm he braces against its edge, his entire body shaking, cap in disarray, hair tufting out from beneath the lining.

"Are you all right, mate?" he asks, laughing.

"He's pissed. Let him sleep it off in the ditch outside. He's followed up more than a few revelries in it, haven't you, Tim?"

"It's closing time anyway, you assholes," the bartender calls out, wiping up the beer round Tim and slinging the cloth back over his shoulder. "Actually, it was closing time half an hour ago. Let's have an arm or two for the boy, and all get the hell on out."

He leans across the bar toward the man as the others begin to collect their jackets and their hats, taking final sips, storing away their instruments, getting in their last jabs. "Actually, I think you're going to want to let us stay, darling. Tim and I will close the bar. We're perfectly trustworthy."

"Sure. That sounds good," the bartender agrees amicably, blinking his glazed eyes.

He pulls Tim off the bar and sits him on a nearby stool as the building begins to empty itself into the street, the greasy fingers of this wet southern night slithering in through the door to gets its slime down his neck, the boy's giggles slowing into random spurts here and there as the crowd lingers outside for only a moment and then starts to disperse, carrying their farewells off with their footsteps, a few of the more inebriated ones ricocheting off all the clattery things which drunks are led to with unerring feet.

"Good night, boys," the bartender says, tipping his hat.

He buttons his vest and steps outside, closing the door behind him.

"Jesus Christ I'm drunk," Tim laughs, pulling his head up off his arm.

"You'll shake it off quickly," he assures the boy, and hops the bar to wander some of the more expensive racks of alcohol, hands behind his back. "They're not half terrible, for a bunch of humans. Very entertaining."

"They're a good group. I've come here since before I was turned. Few of them knew my Ma; sort of helped me get my legs underneath me again."

"While Nik was kicking them right back out."

Tim fists his hand on the bar and sets his chin in it, his long lashes fluttering. "I knew what I was getting into, didn't I? I mean, I've tried to blame him a lot. He's charismatic, he's manipulative- he makes you…he makes you want to be worthy of his attention, you know?"

He knows, darling.

"But, I mean…he never forced me. That's what it all comes down to," he says quietly, knocking off his cap with one hand and running his fingers back over his hair, all the way to the little tail that kicks up a bit in the back, curling at the end.

"You always put your lips to the most poisonous stream. The clean one's not very interesting, is it?"

Tim looks up from beneath his brows, shifting his chin a bit on his fist.

He smiles, a very tiny thing, but it sends a little shiver down his spine. "I guess you would know. Nine hundred and…?"

"Nineteen." He leans forward. "And I've put my lips to a lot of things, over the years."

Tim lets his head drop back to the bar with a groan. "If there's one fookin' thing to say for all this shit, at least I won't have a hangover in the morning," he says, his brogue slipping through.

"Well, that's worth a murder or two, wouldn't you say, darling? And none of it even goes to your hips!"

He hops up onto the bar to sit with his back to Tim, crossing his feet at the ankle and swinging them lazily, pulling his untucked shirt up out of the little spot of beer the bartender missed. "You know, Nik- once he's done with something, he' s done. There's not going to be a Jane Austen ending."

"There's no Jane Austen ending for anyone who lives forever," Tim says quietly.

He leans back to rest his shoulder briefly against the boy's forehead, and flicks his chin. "You see- I told Marcel you weren't nearly as dumb as letting Nik use you for one of his puppets would suggest."

Tim is silent for several long moments. "I'm not queer."

"I'm 919. I'm not burdened by society's prejudice. After a couple of human lifetimes, sexuality becomes as fluid as morals. You give an animal long enough, it always evolves. Do you think Nik's the only one to put his paddle in the other side of the river?"

"I just -I'm not- I like women. I do; I don't even understand how I could have…you know?"

"Nik sort of has that effect on people."

Tim blinks.

He laughs. "You can wind your jaw back up into your face, darling. We're not that twisted of a family. I mean Nik's very persuasive." He looks down at his still-swinging feet. "And there's enough of him left that you want to pull a bit more of it to the surface, every time you glimpse it. That's the real quicksand, mate."

Tim lets another long silence descend between them. "Would you…uh…would you maybe- I'm here a lot. I haven't- I haven't really got anywhere else to go, anyway. Do you think you might want to come back, another night?"

Did you know, Nik, you give the boy just a bit of kindness, hand him a little interest, sit and really listen to him only every so often, that's all you need, and he just opens right up.

There's another boy like that.

You have not always been conscious of that.

But at least you tried when he brought forth his concerns.

Once upon a time.

But. That was many, many lifetimes ago, Nik, and there's no use crying over spilt intestines, now is there?

"I might need a lot of persuading," he tells the boy silkily, but his smile is genuine.

* * *

He leaves Nik and Elijah to their little plots, spends his nights ripping up the Channel with Tim, occasionally sober, more often not, cleans out the pockets of these humans who return with larger friends to challenge the slender pretty boy who will never grow into his shoulders, takes on three at a time at Lafitte's, talks the boy into skinny dipping in the Mississippi before the scandalized gasps of the church parishioners gathered to see off their preacher in a flock of ashes, drains every meal he takes, breaks out half the shop windows in the French Quarter, sets flame to the remainder, pops into the house just often enough to see that Nik is still out, that he has not left a note.

"Well, darling, what shall we do today? I know." He points at Tim. "There's a big to-do tonight at the Theatre de l'Opera. Do you want to see some very expensive panties make their way up the golden cracks of this town?"

Tim laughs. "Fuckin'- what have you got?"

"I'm going to hang myself from the stage. I'll drop down right in the middle of the actors, mid-scene, cause quite a panic of course, and beforehand we'll have cleared out one of the boxes off to the side, right? And we'll put you there, out of sight, of course, and as they're all flailing about, I want you to give a great, big, booming laugh. Make it as evil as you can get it."

"Like this?" He throws his head back and lets off a cackle.

"From the back of the throat, mate. Wa ha ha ha HA HA HA. You're Satan. You've just sacrificed a goat. You ate a virgin."

He tries again.

"Yes!  _Feel_ it. Right in your chest." He taps the boy's pecs. "You bleed sin. You eat cock for breakfast. Your mother swaddled you in the wrong skin. You are everything wrong with the entire world. You're a Negro who wants my penis. You're a lady who flashed her bare ankle. Also one of your jacket sleeves is just a bit shorter than the other."

"Is that one of the official sins?" Tim asks, smiling at him.

He tweaks his nose. "Just ask my brother. Elijah believes very firmly in capital punishment for the mistreatment of any innocent garment."

It's possible it's only an invention of his own mind.

Those who have been thrown scraps always let loose with an imagination that conjures up a deeper meaning.

But when he leaves his hand for just a moment against Tim's face, the boy leans himself into it, just a little, very subtly, his lashes brushing not even long enough to tickle.

He pulls back.

Nik would have pushed forward.

But the boy's been dinged up enough for now, wouldn't you say?

There is not much softness left to hearts that have endured nine lifetimes. Lot of granite put through to the organ, after that much time.

Still. He has not completely forgotten what it is to relate to similar bruises.

"Come on," he says, and jerks his head toward the door of the hotel room where Tim has taken up residence. "Let's have a dress rehearsal, shall we? Church ought still to be in session."

"You're not going to hang yourself in a church."

He slings his arm round Tim's shoulders. "I'm going to hang myself in a church, and you're going to sing from the rafters the little song I'm going to compose on our way over. I think best with the clock ticking."

"You know I'm a good Irish Catholic?"

"Well, we'll do it in a Christian church. I wouldn't want to dent up your devotion. What is it the Church has to say again about lying with a man as a woman?" He leans in close and flicks his tongue in and out of Tim's ear.

Tim jerks away with a startled cry, wiping spit from the side of his face. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you little asshole!"

"You have a very dirty mouth. I think I should wash it out."

"With what- your tongue?"

"Now you're just hinting. It's all right. You don't have to be ashamed of it. You've already seen me naked- I understand that can only be resisted for so long, and you've done fantastically."

Tim pushes his head away with two fingers.

He falls back to slap the boy across the ass.

Tim pops him across the stomach with his cap, and they fall out into the hall laughing, earning a side look from a stately gentleman with his pretty lady on his arm, and so he gives the gentleman a wink and he takes Tim by the hand to place an open-mouthed kiss against his wrist.

The woman comes to an abrupt halt.

"There's room for one more," he says, aiming this at the man.

"Good Lord," the woman snaps, and they both hurry off.

"You're going to get me burned at the stake."

"Of course not. You're nearly as pretty as I am- I wouldn't let that be marred. Bone structure such as ours is museum-quality. You preserve that. If only we could have children, darling," he laments.

"But who would raise them?"

"We'd do it together. You would change the diapers, handle all the feedings, wake up in the middle of the night with them, and teach them that it is never ok to listen to their Aunt Bekah, while I held down the most important job of all: maintaining and improving upon my already otherworldly handsomeness. No, scratch that second part. You cannot improve Michelangelo's  _David_."

"Didn't he have a small dick?"

"I'm sure it was very cold."

Tim notices suddenly that they are still holding hands, and disentangles their fingers.

"Have you got your laugh down? Let loose with it first. Then, when I come back to life, I'll begin to dance round on my rope. That's when you start singing. I want a standing ovation, so put everything you've got into it."

* * *

The First Presbyterian Church lets out with a howl like the lamentations of those first to the shores of Satan.

Tim swings down from one of the rafters, shaking his head.

There is the wailing of sirens far off in the distance.

The weeping of a few very distraught grandmothers (his best audience- at least one heart attack among them, a few more probable, very nice, you just don't get appreciation like that, you know), the confused sobs of their grandchildren, the hushed murmuring of the more composed-

"Tim," he hisses through his compressed windpipe. "In my left pocket."

"What? We've got to go, Kol."

"I nicked Elijah's camera. Go on and get it."

"What- Jesus."

The sirens swell.

"Come on- this was a good one. For posterity."

"Jesus." Tim wraps one arm round his shins to steady his pendulum corpse and gropes round with his free hand for the bulge of the Kodak in his pocket, one corner of his lip caught up in concentration, brow furrowed, his feet straining up onto their tiptoes.

"Oh, yes." He moans loudly. "Right there. Just like that.  _Yes_. You have the fingers of Aphrodite. Yessss. Just like that, my little Irish cupcake."

"Would you shut the fuck up- they're going to try and snap me up for rutting corpses now."

"Oh, that would be funny; quick, put your trousers round your ankles."

Tim wrests the camera free and pops the window out.

The sirens are a shriek now, the tires of their bearers squealing in the streets, the weeping dimming as so often it does when help is near at hand.

He smiles and puts up his thumb.

The shutter clicks deafeningly.

Tim stuffs the camera into his vest.

He reaches up to snap the rope one-handed.

He lands on his feet.

They burst through the doors of the church and shoulder their way through the crowd, the rope still around his neck, Tim's cap pulled low over his eyes, and as the first of the responders draws to a halt outside the church, he leaps onto the hood of the car, drapes both his arms over the little windshield, tips himself upside down to peer into the interior of the car. "Four cylinder?" he asks.

"That's the dead man!" a woman shrieks, and begins to scream.

He rights himself. "Tim! Your hat!"

The boy tosses it to him.

He catches it nimbly, sets it on his head, sweeps it off once more as he takes a bow. "Did you know a man died in there?" he asks the officers. "And that man was trying to penetrate him post-mortem?" He points at Tim. "Anyway. Horrible what this city is coming to, isn't it? Carry on, darlings."

He bounds off the hood.

The screaming woman faints.

"I didn't penetrate anyone post-mortem. Just so that's out there," Tim makes sure to tell the crowd before they both flash off into one of the side streets.

* * *

"Kol," Bekah says to him one night as he is lying in his bed, waiting for it to not be so bloody cold, and he looks up from beneath the arm he has got draped over his forehead.

"Thank you...for not telling Nik where I was. In London." She touches a hand nervously to her hair, the way she always does when she's about to bare the bit of herself behind the teeth and the claws. "You should try and be home more often. He's been asking about you."

No he hasn't.

Nik's got you now, Bekah.

But he does appreciate the little bone you have snuck him from your five-course feast.

* * *

Marcel stops him in the French Quarter one morning with a hand to his shoulder and a smile to split his face. "Where you been, Kol? Haven't seen you in, what- probably a good three weeks? A month?"

"About that."

"What the hell have you been up to?"

"The usual, of course. Breaking hearts. Inspiring jealousy. Collecting the knickers of all my conquests."

"You're not mixed up in this witch business, are you? Klaus has got himself real twisted up over something. Thought maybe you were playing for the other team."

He shoves his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. "I haven't been anywhere near the witches, actually. Nik and Elijah have a monopoly on that. I'm doing what I do best: being a general pestilence to all who touch me. Do you think they'll ever invent a cure for me?" he asks, pasting over this question with his usual smile.

Marcel stands studying him for a moment, wiping the heat of this lazy morning from his forehead. "You all right?"

Of course.

Here, darling.

Have a joke.

It's what he's good for, after all.

* * *

"If you can make it to the roof from here, I'll let you feel anything you like."

Tim eyes the span of empty gray sky between the Hotel Monteleone and the roof of the bar they have stretched themselves out across, a jar of pickled asparagus between them.

He laces his hands on top of his hat and licks his lips.

"Anything."

"You'd let me do that anyway." He squints. "You really think I can't make that?"

"Ten seconds of sloppy groping says you can't."

"So I make the jump, and I feel you up. I don't, and you feel me up. Either way, you win."

"You really think I'm the only winner in that scenario? Did I ever tell you there are ballads featuring certain skill sets of mine?"

"Yeah, the whole lot of bullshit that drops from your mouth every time it opens. That's a handy skill." Tim gets up into a crouch, bounces a little on his heels, cracks his neck. He rubs a hand across his chin. "How much does it hurt, if I miss?"

"Ever broken every bone in your body before?"

"Oh, yeah, lots of times. Me neighbors used to use me as the silotar in their hurling matches."

"You're getting very lippy. Why don't you put your mouth to better uses?"

"I thought sarcasm was next to godliness?"

"No, that's suits. Or the subjugation of peons. Depends upon which of my brothers you ask."

Tim dangles his hands between his knees and bows his head to laugh. "And what does your sister say?"

"Shut up, your voice smells of peasant. Also, you're standing in that shaft of light that highlights her features just exactly right when she tilts her head precisely three centimeters to the left; move, or she'll dismember you and bury each of the pieces on a different continent."

"She's a bit tiny, to be tossing around those sorts of promises, isn't she?"

"Yes, but she fights very dirty. Ask me about the time she threw Nik off the Great Wall of China after he suggested that perhaps the dress she was wearing wasn't really suited to her coloring. That, and he told some awful pun afterward. Bekah is a tough crowd. You going to make the jump or not?"

"I'm still deciding."

"Do you need motivation?" he asks, and cocks an eyebrow suggestively.

"What if I can make it to the ground without breaking anything? What about that?"

"That's nothing. We're fifteen feet off the ground, darling."

"Shit. Fine. I'm doing it."

"You're not jumping."

"I'm working myself up to it."

"What's the nastiest thought you've ever had?"

"What?"

"I'm distracting you. You'll work yourself out of it if you sit here and spend the entire time thinking about opening your head on the ledge of the Monteleone. So what's the nastiest thought you've ever had? Sexually, I mean."

"I'm not telling you that."

"It was about me, wasn't it?"

Tim rubs between his eyebrows.

"Was it a sheep?"

"No! Jesus."

"This is a non-judgmental rooftop."

"You tell me your nastiest thought, then, if you can just pop it out like that."

"To be tied up by a man in a penguin suit and spanked until I bleed while we are silently watched by four clowns who will wash my left foot but not my right and then go on to partially eat the man in the penguin suit and have an orgy without -and here's the tricky part- removing any portion of their costumes. They can speak then, but only to call one another 'Daddy'."

"Did you just pull that out of your ass?"

"Entirely. Did you like it?"

"You know it was eerily close to my own nasty thought?"

"You be Clown #1, I'll be Clown #2?"

"No. I distinctly remember being Clown #4 in my fantasies."

He lounges back on his hands with a smile as Tim stands up, shaking the kinks from his legs. "Oh, look- you're jumping," he says, and kicks him over the side of the roof.

The boy falls noisily, cursing the entire way.

"Fucker."

His hat comes sailing up from somewhere beyond the lip of the roof, skittering across the brick.

"All right, come on up- I promise I'll kiss it better."

* * *

Tim never does make the jump, but there's a very nice storm that night, lots of lightning, the white tongues of the tempest sizzling along the clouds, and so they stay on the roof to watch, the jar of asparagus forgotten at the edge to drown in the sporadic tears of this ill-tempered midnight, Tim's hat pulled low enough to keep the rain out of his eyes, he with his jacket in a pillow beneath his head.

"It's beautiful," Tim says, crossing his legs at the ankle.

A lot of things are.

Because you forget a truth for a while does not make it less true.

When you have your hand buried in the guts of the world and you have spent all your time unraveling them into the mud, you very often forget to look up.

He doesn't want to be all poetical about this. He is no artist; language is only a means to an end. You'll find no flowers in his mouth or honey on his tongue.

But lift your head once in a while, all right, darling?

Tim shifts next to him, rolls over onto his side, props his head up on his hand. "Have you ever wanted to go somewhere you haven't yet gotten around to?"

He narrows his eyes against the rain.

Back.

That's it.

"I've pretty much been everywhere."

"I've been to Ireland, I've been here. I guess I'm trying to figure out where to go next."

"Well, it's not like you don't have time."

"Yeah." Tim takes off his hat, flicks water from the brim. "Would you want to come?"

He keeps his eyes on the sky, but he lets enough of a smile soften his face for the boy to see. "You'd need some sort of guide, wouldn't you, a new thing like you? And you wouldn't want Nik- he's all wrong for that sort of thing. He'll take you to the museums, to all the great views of the world- all very nice, but who will have a penis joke ready at just precisely the right moment, when you think to yourself how much of the world you have left to explore, how much of it will perhaps have faded before you can ever even get to it, because what endures is us and us alone?"

"That's what it comes down to, doesn't it? Everything around you dies? But not you."

"But not me. Not you, either."

"And how long does it take to get used to that?"

Well.

Forever.

But coincidentally enough, that's exactly how long you have left to you.

* * *

They are sharing a cigar in the Academy of the Sacred Heart Chapel, Tim's feet up on the pew in front of them, his right leg looped lazily over Tim's left, when the doors open with a bang.

He tucks his leg back onto the bench they are slouched against and swings his other over Tim, straddling him as a very thunderous-looking priest appears in the doorway.

Tim takes the cigar from his lips and puts it to his own.

"Sorry. We're just very big fans of what you do here. We need a bit of help, as you can see." He bends down to run his tongue up the side of Tim's neck.

Tim shudders and lets out a breath, his head falling back against the pew.

"Did you want to join? You've got to have something to pour out into your confessional booth, don't you?" He takes another long drag from the cigar Tim passes him, and runs one of his hands high up his thigh.

He feels Tim's hips subtly press forward.

The doors slams.

"I'm going to hell," Tim says.

"You're not going anywhere; that's the beauty of immortality. Which means you could take care of that right now, right here, if you wanted to." He flicks his thumb briefly over Tim's erection, and then stands up.

Tim flushes and drops his boots from the pew.

He throws the cigar still-smoldering onto the floor.

"It'll put itself out," he tells Tim when the boy moves his foot to smudge it beneath his toe.

"Or not."

It's only a building, and one day like all other things that are not him, it will no longer stand.

Why not today?

* * *

They close out once more that first bar with the drunken harmonica player and the even drunker fiddler, everyone dissolved off into the night, a gale tearing at the shutters, two tumblers of whiskey between them, he leaning against the bartender's side of the counter, Tim the patron's.

Midnight has come through the windows to touch her tendrils to the boy's flushed cheeks and long lashes, all the lights shut off for the night, just darkness between them.

"All right, I've got one," Tim says. "A man goes to the doctor and he says to him-"

He leans forward across the bar and touches his lips very lightly to Tim's.

It's a blinding thing, takes up no time at all, but he doesn't pull back very far, just enough to see what Tim wants to do, those long lashes lifting hesitantly from his cheek, tongue coming out to taste his lips, the silence taking on flesh now, building itself into quite a bulk between them.

They stare at one another for a moment.

Tim clears his throat.

He drops his head to scratch at the back of his neck.

"Well that was a misinterpretation of some signals, wasn't it? You ought to be careful what you're putting out there for innocents like myself to get themselves all keyed up over," he says, brushing his hands down his trousers and then slipping them into his pockets.

It's a sharper sting than he'd have ever imagined, pulling back from this boy with no greater reciprocation than a couple blinks of his pretty blue eyes.

"Kol-"

"A man goes to his doctor and he says to him?"

"Uh, he says- I forgot, actually."

"My kisses do tend to have that effect." He smiles. "I'm sure you've got another. If not, I have nine hundred years worth of dirty jokes. In fact, I've probably already heard all the ones you have to tell. But go on and see if you can put a new spin on them."

Tim shifts himself from stool to counter, swiveling round so that his legs sweep over the bar and dangle down the other side. "Right. So, what about…um…yeah! Four drunks walk into a church, and the first of them goes up to the preacher and tells him there's a dog outside. Preacher doesn't say anything. So the second drunk yells, "There's a dog outside!" and pokes him in the shoulder. The preacher doesn't even move." He opens his knees, runs his hands down his thighs. "So the third drunk says, 'I'm an awkward, shithead idiot.'" The boy ducks his head and gives that bashful crinkle of his nose that puts his heart to his ribcage, and now the silence stretches between them once more, even heavier this time, and then Tim hops down off the bar and leans down to close the four inch gap between them.

He's a very tentative kisser, soft, so he lets the boy take the lead, setting both hands lightly on Tim's hips, tipping his head back to accommodate this difference in height, opening his mouth but leaving his tongue inside.

Tim pulls back, presses their foreheads together, just stands there breathing against his lips for a moment.

He kisses the corner of Tim's mouth, his bottom lip, buries one hand in the hair at the nape of the boy's neck.

"Kol-" he says quietly, and then he surges in for another kiss, still open-mouthed, still no tongue, pushing a noisy exhale through his nose, his hips pressing forward, his cock twitching against the front of his trousers.

He takes Tim's hat off his head and tosses it somewhere behind them, grabbing the boy's neck in both hands.

They stumble back against the bar, Tim's tongue in his mouth now, both of them grinding against one other, Tim's lips separating from his to muffle a curse into his neck, his shoulders heaving, his pulse throbbing, both of them digging in with their fingers hard enough to hurt now, hips bruising where they crash together.

"Bite me," he gasps.

"What?" Tim asks hazily.

He tips his head to the side. "Bite me. As hard as you can."

"What- I'm not-"

He runs his tongue over Tim's bottom lip, pulls him into a kiss so hard their teeth clack together. "Do it. Bite me. Or do you want me to go first?" he asks, and with reptile speed, darts his fangs out to taste the boy's shoulder.

Tim's knees buckle.

He laps at the wound for just a second, brings his bloody mouth back to Tim's, kisses him until neither of them can hardly breathe, and then it becomes a frenzy, Tim ripping into the side of his neck, he scratching at his back, both of them pistoning their hips, the bar creaking at his back, Tim's jagged gasps in his ear, their kisses smearing blood, saliva, all of it one blurry mess until Tim finally pulls back, putting a good foot and a half between them.

He wipes his mouth.

Tim takes a moment to get his breath back.

He reaches up to smear a spot of red gently off the boy's chin.

Tim drops his chin to tentatively kiss Kol's palm, leaving his lips there, his lashes flickering against the tips of his fingers, his breath slowing as his heart winds slowly back to that elevated beat of the monster. "Do you want to go back to my hotel?"

He tips his head, smiles very faintly as he takes his thumb across Tim's cheekbone, just below his eye. "Why don't you think on it for a bit?"

"What?"

"No one understands the desire to get me out of my trousers better than me, darling. But Nik tore you up a bit."

You're young. You've got time. You don't need to cat round with an old man whose bones never stretched beyond those green saplings of the teenaged years. Not if you don't want to.

You had that choice with Nik, too, you know. It's just that you never can see that far past his brother's smile, now can you?

He claps his hands together. "Now. Prepare yourself for the astonishing wit of the prettiest man, woman, creature you will ever meet- I am unfairly multifaceted, aren't I? And did you notice that little thing I did with my tongue? You won't come across that again."

"And on the seventh day, God created Kol," Tim says, ducking his head a little bashfully and putting his hands in his pockets, his smile very innocent for something so red.

"And he was perfect. But you've seen me naked. You already know that."

"It's gettin' a bit deep in here. I don't think my boots reach high enough."

"Don't sass your elders. They've eaten kings. Show some respect."

Tim picks up his hat and bows elaborately, one arm out to the side.

"That's what I like to see." He shoves the boy playfully into the rack of bottles behind him, catching his hat as it jolts up out of his hand and placing it on his own head. "I worked up an appetite while you were taking advantage of me. You want to get something to eat?"

Tim chokes a little. "Right. I pinned a 919-year-old vampire against the bar and had my vicious, newborn way with him while he pleaded with me to stop."

"That sounds nice. We can do that instead." He smiles. "But, no, really, darling, I'm famished. I need something fast. Let's pop over to the Quarter and pick up a street-walker or two, what do you say? We'll even let one of them go, if she can get us both off simultaneously, with only her mouth."

* * *

They are walking through Storyville one night when Tim darts out his hand so quickly that he understands the boy has thought about this for a very long time, wrestled it round, stamped it flat, puffed it back up once more, let it grow until like so many things which are pinned down it expands beyond his control.

He slips his fingers through Kol's own.

He smiles across at the boy as a man edges round them with just a glance to these linked hands, because what lurks in the gutters of this district is far more sticky with mire than two gentlemen who close the space between them just a bit too much.

He lifts Tim's hand and kisses his wrist. "Let's hit up Emma Johnson's. I can hear it from here; she's obviously got one of her sex circuses in full swing."

" _Sex circus_?"

Kol jerks them both to a dead halt. "You're not about to tell me you've lived in New Orleans thirteen years and you've never been to Emma Johnson's."

"I'd never even been into Storyville until I fell in with your brother."

"I am  _ashamed_. Nik has utterly failed you. Come on," he says, and tugs the boy down the street after him, giving a little skip up out of the road and onto the sidewalk, unbuttoning his dinner jacket as he goes, giving his bowtie a tug to twist Elijah's knickers, letting it swing loose round his throat as they walk, hands still joined.

"Behold: Emma Johnson's French Studio, the seat of all sin."

It's a grand mansion, painted up very nicely, ladies in the windows inviting sin from beyond the froth of their delicate curtains, jazz poking itself through all the openings in this house with its wide doors and half-cracked windows, the ballroom into which they let themselves echoing with the cannon shots of men's catcalls and lady's jeers.

He drops Tim's hand.

"All right, everyone! I'm very sorry to inform you that this has become a private show. No grumbling now. Just step right out." He slaps a few of the cuter ones across the ass as they make their way past, then whips round to face the performers frozen in the sudden uncertainty of an act interrupted. "Don't pay any mind to us. Just a couple of paying customers. Very big fans of your work, by the way."

The whores pick up where they left off, two of them busy at the breasts of a fellow performer, another between her legs, the scent of sex and sweat dilating Tim's eyes, his breath picking up as he awkwardly adjusts his hat and shoves his hands into his pockets and tries to look anywhere but this quartet.

"How do you like the blonde?" he asks, leaning in to direct the question right into Tim's ear.

"She's very nice," Tim replies, looking at the ceiling.

He laughs.

A dandy gentleman in a top hat and tails seats himself in an armchair pushed out into the center of the floor by two naked whores and unbuttons his trousers. The first whore leans over to place her hands on the arm rests, her mouth descending, her hair fanning out round them in a curtain between actor and audience, the man throwing back his head as she takes his cock to the hilt.

The second ties the ribbon at her waist.

She trails her lips sensuously up the back of the first.

"What's she wearing?" Tim asks.

He ducks his head to smother his smile in his palm. "It's called a dildo."

"Is she going to-"

The woman thrusts forward with a buck of her hips, and the first whore bows up from the man's cock with a little cry, arches her back, pushes back with her own hips as her lover settles into a violent rhythm, their flesh clapping together, the man spreading his knees and taking his cock into his fist as he watches, his head still back against the chair, the hat spilling off his head to bare his bald patch to the sun of the chandelier overhead.

"Wait until you see the pony."

" _What_?"

"Well, it's not a real one." He leans his chin against Tim's shoulder, and nods his head toward the far side of the ballroom.

A man outfitted in rein and bit scampers across the floor on his hands and knees, pulling a little cart upon which sit two whores in proper gown and hat, one slouched on the driver's bench, her slippered feet propped up on the rest in front of her, skirts up to her hips, the other kneeling between her legs, face buried.

The sitting lady tips her hat and cracks her whip.

He loops his arms round Tim's waist, hesitates for a moment, presses a kiss to his shoulder.

He trails his nose up the side of Tim's neck, stops just behind his ear, kisses this sensitive spot softly, drags his lips round to the lobe, bites it with his human teeth.

Tim twists his head to put himself cheek to cheek with him, tilts himself just a little further, leans into a languid kiss of lazy tongues, and wandering hands, both of them beginning to move against one another now, Tim's trousers straining beneath the fingers he slides down over the boy's hip and skims down the fly, his cock twitching, Tim's fangs putting in an appearance to prick his bottom lip-

The woman with her quartet of attendants cries out her orgasm.

Tim murmurs something into their kiss.

"What?" he rasps, blinking himself out of his languor as he pulls away.

"I'm a little worried. They've already brought out a man in a pony costume- are we going to see your penguin and four clowns?" Tim's nose crinkles.

"Don't you want to see how they have an orgy without even taking off their trousers?"

Tim laughs.

They bump noses in a brief kiss, Tim's cock still in his hand.

He runs his thumb over the head and then pulls away.

* * *

The crowd gives a roar to rattle the very rafters.

Tim spins the table leg in his hand.

He pops the head off the man who lunges for him, twirls it in a playful circle, wings it across the room.

"Ten on two now, darlings! You can tie one of my hands behind my back this time."

"Nobody?" Tim calls out. He slings the table leg over his shoulder.

"All right, all right. One hand behind my back, his cock in my mouth, and you can break my good arm."

Someone tries to rush him from the back.

He stabs backward beneath his arm with the table leg Tim tosses to him, and he tips his head back and shuts his eyes to truly savor the sudden perfume of death, table leg quivering against his ribs,

Lafitte's sends up another roar.

* * *

He hangs his head out the Model T they have snatched from the Quarter, barking rabidly at the passersby who scatter with startled shrieks before them, Tim grinding the gears, whip lashing the wheel, jerking them up onto the sidewalk, back down into the street, the wet summer wind howling in their hair, that familiar scream of the sirens coalescing behind them, the scent of rubber, adrenaline,  _terror_  all round him-

They crash carelessly into the side of the Theatre de l'Opera and come out with their hands up.

"Get on your knees," one of the officers snaps.

"Ooh, I like where this is going."

He head butts the officer, snatches his gun, shoots one through the throat, another through the heart, rips into the shoulder of a third, takes the neck of a fourth in his hand and slams the man down onto his back against the hood of his car.

A blink wipes the human features from his face, and the man begins to scream.

He runs his tongue sensually up the line of the frightened tear that creeps its way from the officer's eye to his cheek, and shoots him in the head.

Tim rises from his crouch with his lips stained.

He stuffs the revolver into his pocket and holds out his hands. "Is this a gun in my pocket, or am I just happy to see you?"

* * *

They give to the walls of the St. Stephen's confessional quite a few new sins to breathe into the ears of priests, both their shirts off, Tim straddling him, lips bloody with the violence of their kisses, his fingers digging into the boy's shoulders until the skin gives beneath them.

" _Fuck_ ," Tim gasps into his mouth, grinding against him, kissing his sweaty forehead, the dimple in his chin, his torn lips.

He holds the boy's cheeks in his hands and tongues him until neither of them can breathe, thrusting brutally up with his hips, panting death rattles against Tim's mouth, sucking on his bottom lip, denting it with his fangs, tasting what wells up, sliding one of his hands down between them to feel Tim's cock through his trousers, stroking the shaft as he rubs himself against the head-

"Shit;  _shit_ -Kol-" he hisses, and suddenly Tim stiffens against him, his mouth opening, a little shudder rippling up his spine to touch itself to his shoulders.

He drops his head back against the wall of the booth. "Did you just come?" He runs his hand up from Tim's cock through the line of fair hair that disappears down his trousers, all the way to the nipple he circles gently with his thumb.

" _Fuck_ ," Tim mumbles.

He laughs and leans forward to kiss the point of the boy's chin, just below his bottom lip. "Did you try to make this into a contest? I think I've got just a bit of a leg up on you so far as sexual stamina."

"I was just sort of hoping to not go in me goddamned trousers."

"You could have warned me. I do swallow, you know." He wiggles his eyebrows.

Tim laughs and brings a hand to his face.

He moves it to kiss him lingeringly, their lips moving softly this time, Tim breaking away to skim his mouth over Kol's jaw, his neck, his collarbones.

He licks both his nipples, pulls away for just a moment, puts his warm lips back to his sternum, kisses his way one damp press of the lips at a time all the way to the waistband of his trousers.

He undoes the first button.

Kol leans his head back against the wall once more, lifts his hand to find Tim's hair, shifts his hips just enough for Tim to pull his trousers down far enough to free his cock.

He lets out a little breath as first Tim's thumb and then the tip of his tongue find the head of his cock, his eyes fluttering.

Tim licks the underside of it, circles his tongue round the rim, opens his mouth against the head.

He feels his toes curl, his heartbeat trip, his blood surge.

Tim puts him all the way to the back of his throat, and begins to fuck him in earnest now, his tongue sliding wetly, his lips working roughly, just a suggestion of teeth, both his hands sliding up to pin Kol's hips to the bench as he tries to press up with them, both of them gasping, his cock throbbing, little white specks behind his lids, his hands clutching roughly for the hair at the nape of Tim's neck, the bench clattering against the wall, Tim pulling free to lick him everywhere, to press an open-mouthed kiss to the head, to sheathe him all the way once more.

He hears the church doors open.

Tim keeps going.

He tightens the hand in the hair at the nape of Tim's neck until he feels the strands break loose in his fingers.

"Oh my God!" the woman who has come to tell tale of her sins screams, bringing both hands to her mouth.

"Stay right there, darling," he says as Tim licks the head of his cock once more and wraps the base of it in his fingers, stroking him roughly, following his hand with his mouth, his tongue flicking, his fangs very carefully treading that delicious line between pleasure and pain.

He comes with the woman watching them blankly.

They share her between them, and leave her empty in the booth.

* * *

"Russia."

"1812; I was one of the soldiers repelling Napoleon's attack on Moscow. The French have quite a nice flavor, by the way."

Tim runs a finger up his spine. "Japan?"

"1328. Bekah and I had a row over who got to be the emperor. We were so busy fighting over it we never did get round to killing the little twit. We dashed off to Scotland soon after for some war Nik thought would be interesting. It wasn't very. But I got five kills to every two of Nik's, and that pissed him off. So I liked that part."

Tim laughs against his shoulder.

He rolls over to face him, sneaks a kiss, runs his hand down to hook his thumb in the waistband of Tim's trousers. "Do you know what was really fun? The French Revolution. Blood all over the streets. You could bathe in it." He lifts his head to suck on Tim's ear. "You didn't even have to compel anyone- you could eat whoever you liked, whenever you liked, there was that much death. Nobody cared. That's what we need here- a good revolution. Not this little pony show with the witches. Heads in the street."

Tim presses him down onto the bed, a hand on either side of his head, and kisses him.

He grabs a handful of his ass and pulls Tim's cock against his own.

They kiss almost lazily for a while, the sheets rustling beneath them, hips rolling slowly, the ceiling fan rattling out its final fever throes.

It coughs out its last revolution just as he rolls Tim over and straddles him, popping open the first of his trouser buttons.

"That fucker's gone out three times in two weeks."

"Electrical fans are overrated, I guess." He kisses Tim's navel.

"What do you think they'll be like a hundred years from now?"

"They'll probably fly round your head to any angle you command them to." He pops open the second button. "So will the cars."

Tim's legs flash up suddenly round his waist into some wrestler's hold he counters easily, slamming them both back against the headboard where he pins Tim's hands, kissing him brutally.

They part breathlessly.

He rips Tim's trousers getting them down, trails a line of warm wet kisses up his thigh, presses them belly to belly as Tim reaches down to fumble with his own fly.

He kicks his trousers the rest of the way down as Tim wrenches them off his hips and over his ass.

It's a very rough lead-up, a frenzy of biting, tearing, clawing -yes, darling, there we are, get after it- both of them in red smears across the others' lips, his mouth raw, his cock nearly painfully hard, but when he flips them both onto their sides and he slips inside Tim, one hand on the boy's hip to guide his thrusts, he does it almost tentatively, swapping kisses over Tim's shoulder, pumping languidly inside him, leaving his lips pressed against Tim's shoulder when the boy breaks their kiss to catch his breath.

Tim grabs the hand on his hip and slides it down to his cock.

He kisses Tim's neck.

He smoothes his hand down the length of his cock, matching the pace of his hips, swirling his thumb over the damp head, lightening his touch on the down stroke, tightening on the up, pushing up with his own cock to hit just precisely that right angle until with a little choked cry Tim spurts across his hand, reaching back to pull Kol in for an open-mouthed kiss as he comes.

He thrusts harder this time.

The boy pushes a shaky exhale through his nose, shoves himself roughly backward, bites Kol's bottom lip, tongues him violently, shoves himself back once more, and now with another thrust they both come, he muffling it in Tim's shoulder, Tim pressing his face into the pillow beneath him, their hips hammering with bruising force until they have seen this wave through to the end.

He slips out of Tim and rolls him over so that they are facing one another, chests pressed together, lips just barely grazing.

"And that's why you always go Kol, mate."

"Oh, Jesus Christ."

They laugh their way through another breathless kiss.

* * *

Nik is waiting up for him when he slouches through the front door still rumpled with sex.

They stare at one another for a moment, Nik's left foot twitching where he holds it stretched out before him, his stomach giving a little hop into his throat.

"You've been out a lot lately," Nik says, tilting his head to one side.

"Just following your lead, brother. Home is where the murder is. How's your systematic expunging of the local covens going, by the way? I've heard rumors here and there, but you just can't trust someone who's got your arm to the elbow in their guts. They'll say anything to get in your trousers."

Nik doesn't blink.

It's a very eerie thing, this unwavering appraisal. Eyes like a bloody chisel, his big brother.

"Elijah and I have things under control. I'd wager it's a very long time before any witch anywhere gets it into their head to throw off the mantle of oppression under which they perceive themselves to be laboring. Word does tend to travel."

"It's not oppression if you're the one writing the history books." He smiles.

"They did start it." Nik holds his hands out to either side. "They could have chosen to stand idly by while monsters wreak havoc among the innocent. Humanity, after all, has no problem whatsoever with doing precisely that. But let's not talk about business, little brother." Nik sits forward with the smile that reminds him of Father. "I hear you're enjoying my hand-me-downs. Now, not that I can't sympathize with the distraction of Tim's obvious talents, but I have concerns."

"You mean the way I see him as a person around a hole? Yes, that probably is quite alarming for you. Who even does that, am I right, Nik?"

Nik's mouth thins. He stands.

He is neither Bekah nor Elijah, and what fear curdles in his belly will not make its way free to his face or his voice.

"Oh, come on, Nik- don't look at me like that. One line on your forehead is cute; three are just passé." He yanks on the bowtie that he only halfhearted knotted as he left Tim's, unraveling it round his neck. "Didn't Mother ever tell you that at the stroke of midnight a face like that sticks forever?"

"This is not a love story, Kol," Nik tells him menacingly. "Everybody leaves. Have Rebekah's exploits taught you nothing? There is us. That's all."

"Always and forever, yadda, yadda, Nik- you know, I don't really care?" He whips the unknotted tie from his neck. "Besides, who says I'm looking to skip off into the sunset with him? Can't a man have his blasphemous fling and fuck it too?"

"Because you're just as pathetic as the rest of them. You think you can toss out a joke and it covers up every little poke to the heart you take when someone doesn't love you enough. What have I said about the failings of love, little brother, and how we, of all people, ought to be above that sort of fallibility? It's ridiculous. You'll outlast everything, and you look for permanence in something as unstable as bloody  _feelings_."

He smiles very amicably and points at Nik. "You're starting to piss me off, darling. I wouldn't do that. Remember, I'm not Bekah. You won't get out of it with a few vases broken over your head and a pair of sore testicles."

"Don't  _threaten_ me," Nik snaps.

"I'll do whatever I like. I'll outlast everything, remember? Including the knot you've got in your knickers."

Nik looks away, licks his lips, scrubs one hand over his chin, flicks his eyes back to him with just enough of his old brother in his face that this look sinks in to the gut and there lodges its blade, sharp as anything which has ever pierced him.

Hate it when that happens, don't you?

"Kol-"

Nik wets his lips again.

He's quite awkward sometimes, Nik is. He used to see this dallying round the bush when on the other side lurked a pretty thing with long lashes and sly smile, but you were always supposed to just pop wide your mouth and let loose with anything to tickle your throat when the moon cast only two long shadows of brother beside brother.

It's just him, Nik.

He won't make a production out of your apology, brother.

He misses you. He loves you.

But above all, though you will not believe it, for who would pardon a man whose own mother could not absolve the sins of her sons, he forgives you.

Give him a reason to not be ashamed of that, Nik. Mercy is not supposed to be an indignity.

Look:

He'll even go first.

"Nice to see you home; I missed you; care to have a drink and break things?"

All right, Nik.

Your turn.

Your turn, brother.

Nik?

* * *

What he's trying to say-

What he means-

Do not leave him, little brother.

That's all.

But what lives in the hearts of fascists may not make it to their lips, because how much of power is illusory, to be kept in the darkness where all chinks are filled till they no longer show empty round the center?

Kol's smile dims a bit. "Let me try again, Nik. I don't hear Bekah anywhere, so would you like a drink and a snack with the only member of your family who watched you rip Mother's heart out and decided not to spend the rest of eternity hating you? Do you think you'd get that kind of loyalty from Bekah or Elijah? Hmm?"

There is a thundering in his ears that entirely drowns the next words out of his brother's mouth. "What did you say to me?" he asks numbly.

"I said that I saw you kill Mother and I got over it, and not only that, but I've kept it a secret for nine hundred years. Even when you didn't deserve it. Maybe you should think about what that means, and whether you're really applying your loyalty in the right directions. Bekah left you for a century because you killed some minor French nobleman who made her toes curl." Kol taps the end of his nose playfully, smiling eerily. "I watched you murder my own mother, and here I still am., darling. Why don't you think about that?"

He works his dry tongue clumsily against his lips.

He darts his eyes to the left and he calculates the distance from brother to dagger, his nerves making their way in little damp trickles down his palms.

"You can't tell her."

"Why?" Kol cocks his head. "Because she's just forgiven you? Because your precious little bond might not recover from this blow? Because who cares if I forgive you, what about Bekah? Do you know what I find pathetic, Nik? Not love; that's inevitable. I'll give you a hint- actually, let's make it a story. You like those, don't you? Once upon a time, there was a boy named Nik-"

"Shut up."

"-who pinned everyone underneath him because that was the only way he could get any of them to stay, and what's even funnier than that -not in the 'ha ha' sort of way, of course, it's really quite sad- is how afraid he was to-"

"I said shut.  _Up_."

"Well, I don't need to go on anyway, do I, Nik? We know how it ends. Nik Mikaelson sat on his wall; Nik Mikaelson had a great fall. And everyone ground him down into the shit of the street, because that's what he is, isn't that right? That's what his father used to tell him?"

" _Shut your mouth_!"

"And instead of taking the hand his brother held down to him, he spit on it. Because what good is a childhood of oppression if you can't turn it round on the world? You've got to have the bigger boot, don't you? And to apply it indiscriminately, even to those who have loved you through everything?"

Now would be the time to put out his hands, to take his brother by the shoulders, to put them face to face and to make his apologies, because what is not spoken bleeds through every hurt line in his brother's face and tremulous crack in his voice, and it was not always him opening up all these little wounds, you know.

Once he was the one who sealed them up.

But that was before anger was his only recourse, because to roll over and to flash that vulnerable strip of belly, kindness, is never a lesson nine hundred years drums into a man.

So his little brother takes his fist to the jaw with barely a flinch, and he calmly spits out a tooth at their feet, and then they are brawling on the floor.

He breaks Kol's arm.

Kol shatters his kneecap.

Another exchange and he flashes back out of the fray to set his shoulder to rights, to shrug the vertebrae of his neck back into place, and then he grabs Kol by the scruff of the neck, and he hurls him face first into the wall.

Kol breaks his nose on the way down, opens a gash on his temple, chips a tooth, cracks his jaw, goes to his knees coughing blood.

For a very long while, he lets these moist hacks be the only sounds in the room.

"Why don't you run along to your new friend? I was done with him anyway. I don't mind you living off my scraps." He leans in as he straightens his tie, smiling right next to his brother's ear. "You've been doing that for quite a while now anyway, haven't you? Affection's a terrible thing to have to mete out of obligation, wouldn't you agree? It's very tiring."

Kol spits another mouthful of blood and will not look up.

He lifts an arm to wipe his eyes.

You can live for a very long time, and never recover from sights like these.

The last tears this most flippant of brothers shed was not long after the lengthening of their teeth. He held a woman with Mother's face and he stroked her hair very softly, lipped at her throat for a bit, licked up the remains, and then he put a hand to his eyes, and he began to bawl like a child.

You will never guess who stepped up and put their arms round his trembling shoulders.

It was 1045; he didn't know any better.

"Keep your chin up, mate," he says playfully around his thick, thick tongue, and then he jogs up the stairs with his heart in his throat.

* * *

He talks three of Nik's cohorts into a building on Decatur street and sets it on fire.

Their screams are very nice.

He wonders what Nik's would sound like?

* * *

Tim bends him over one of the pews in St. Stephen's and fucks him until the wood snaps beneath him.

He pulls up his trousers and he gives his hair a rakish ruffle and he takes his bat to Nik's favorite art gallery.

* * *

On Tuesday he personally stakes one-third of the French Quarter's vampire population.

On Wednesday he breaks Nik's latest masterpiece over his knee.

Thursday is just generally murdery, vampires, witches, who has time to be specific, darling -it's the chaos that's the thing- Friday brings about a hanging, Saturday another burning, and Sunday- well, even monsters must have their day of rest, isn't that right, God?

Oh, he forgets.

You can't hear him.

That's all right; no one else does either.

Here, then.

Have a few more souls to cluster round your gates with their beggar's fingers to the bars.

* * *

He closes each bar he frequents.

Sometimes those die-hard alcoholics still staggering their steps into two AM mist make it, sometimes they do not.

What are you going to do, darling?

Such is life. Sometimes it's a fever, sometimes starvation, sometimes the guns of a war your government fights at the expense of all its disposables.

Sometimes it's him.

But just imagine the last thing you see, as you make your way into that dim black space all man fears until he finds himself in its warm sleepy grip- that chin, the cheekbones- those eyes!

You're welcome, darling.

* * *

Tim sleeps like a child.

Set a bomb off over the head of this one and see if he has a lash flicker to spare, he thinks with what feels to him like a fond smile, but what does he know, about loving and being loved, and he carefully strokes the hair just beginning to shag down over the boy's ear.

He settles down onto his side with his chest to Tim's back and one arm draped over his hip.

It's not a love story, is it, Nik?

He knows that.

He just was hoping not to have it shoved in his face.

* * *

There is an early sunrise through the window when he jolts awake with his stomach in knots.

Tim is already in front of the looking glass with lather and a razor to his chin, his bottom lip sucked in as he scrapes carefully round the underside of it, one hand gripping the small desk upon which the glass is propped as he leans in toward it.

"I see you've got those three hairs shaking in their boots."

"Hey." Tim points the razor at him. "I'm going to grow out a moustache and wax the ends of it like that man you ate last night."

"I should have made that last a lot longer. He deserved it. You just don't wear something like that where other people can see it." He kicks the sheet off him and kisses Tim's shoulder on his way into the bathroom.

He spends a long time over the sink, reddening his cheeks with handfuls of cold water, scrubbing the sleep from his eyes, slicking down little uncooperative strands of hair here and there while out in the main room Tim finishes his morning routine.

"You all right?" Tim asks, shuffling into the room as he sponges the lather from his face with the towel round his bare shoulders, tilting his head back to get the froth underneath his jaw line. "You're looking a little-"

"Shitty?"

Tim hops up to sit on the edge of the sink. "Nah. Just tired." He reaches out to brush a strand of hair from Kol's eyes.

He parts Tim's knees and crowds himself between them, smiling up at him. "I know a way you could wake me up."

Tim ducks his head to smile down at the hands he coils just a bit nervously in his lap -quite the adorable little thing, isn't he- and then he leans forward to put them forehead to forehead.

They swap an open-mouthed kiss.

He drops his hand between Tim's legs and begins to stroke him with his thumb.

Tim kisses down the side of his neck, presses his fangs in just a fraction, licks what wells free, shifts himself just far enough forward that they are cock to cock.

"I was going to ask -I mean, I was thinking of- I might go back to Ireland. I miss it." He makes a little noise in the back of his throat as Kol rolls their hips leisurely together. "Not right now." He tips his head back. Kol kisses up his throat, onto his chin, along his jaw line and to the lobe of his ear. He sinks his teeth in.

Tim digs his nails into his hips. "I know you have your family."

They share one more lingering kiss, Tim's tongue sliding sensually along his own, and then they part.

"Are you asking me to go with you?" He cocks his head.

"If you want to. I mean, I'm not expecting it or anything, I just, I mean- you said you haven't been there since the 1500s. It's not- it's not like here, or anything, uh," he looks down with a little embarrassed laugh, "I don't think there are half the whorehouses, or theatres or anything like that, but it's- it's nice. Green. We have a lot of rebellions?"

Kol laughs.

He sometimes forgets what a freeing thing that can be. When you spend the greater part of your 919 years laughing at others it is easy to overlook that mirth is not always a thing to be had at the expense of your fellow man.

You can be happy.

It's a reason all on its own.

Isn't that something?

"Are there more of you, where you came from?" he asks mischievously, running his hands up Tim's thighs.

"There better not be."

"What? Do you not share very well? Don't tell me we haven't even gotten you into a threesome before you want to be all exclusive. It's all right; perfectly understandable, darling. Once you've had me, there's no turning back."

"You're so fuckin'-"

He cuts Tim off with a long kiss, flicking his tongue skillfully. "Intimidatingly flawless?"

"That's exactly what I was going to say, ya' narcissistic little fucker."

"There's nothing little about me."

Tim jerks him in closer by the hips. "All right; I won't argue with that one."

"I'll go back with you."

"You will?"

"Yes; in a couple of weeks. Just let me break a few more of Nik's things first." He bends his head to suck Tim's nipple between his lips, unbuttoning his trousers. "Keep an eye out today, would you? I've got 900 years of gut instincts poking me this morning."

Tim laughs. "I could make a comment about what's poking you, but it's too easy."

He kisses Tim's neck softly. "I'm serious, actually. Nik might decide to pop your head off and leave it on my bed. I've pissed him off a lot this last week, and he thinks I like you."

"Do you?"

Well, now, that's the thing, isn't it.

A lot of lines get blurred in 900 years, particularly that pesky little distinction between a bit of instinctive warmth and that far more dangerous cliff edge that is love.

He can tell you that he is clumsily unpracticed in both the giving and the receiving of it; that last he felt a stirring like this he killed quite ruthlessly; that when you smile it goes straight to his chest rather than to his groin.

What does that mean, exactly?

It's funny, isn't it.

You never can determine just exactly what it is that signifies this emotion that sends men to their deaths for it, no matter how many years you've pressed flat beneath your boot.

"I don't want to see your head on my bedcovers. I know that."

Tim smiles gently up at him. "I'll make sure it stays where it is."

"All right." He tweaks Tim's nose. "At least have a thought to your mouth, darling; it's very useful."

* * *

He passes three days with this same snarl of premonition in his belly, but if Nik's little pending plots are the seeds of his unease, he is still patting the dirt round them and giving them a good water, because he kills in peace (two humans, seven more of Nik's little minions; just imagine, darling, the look on his face), and when he and Tim walk the length of Storyville one early morning, there is hardly a soul to be had.

They drink themselves into a round of sloppy sex in the parlor of one of Storyville's brothels, and then with Tim draped giggling round his neck, hat askew, they stagger their way into the street where two startled patrons watch them clumsily grope one another on Lulu White's stoop.

He walks Tim back to his hotel and drops him off with a kiss of bumped noses and teeth clicked together, both of them holding the other up, laughing into one another's mouths, their kisses a bit spitty but no less enthusiastic, Tim opening his mouth to get his tongue in on the embrace.

There is a sudden wind against his back. "Kol, get back to the house. Now."

"Elijah?"

Tim blinks hazily.

"What are you doing here?"

"I need you to get back to the house. Don't argue with me. If Niklaus and Rebekah are home, clear them out immediately. Leave the city, whether I'm back or not."

He drops his hands from Tim's waist. "What's going on, Elijah?"

"Father is here," Elijah says, his voice cracking just a little. "I thought I might find you here, so I stopped in on my way back to the house. I know you often stay over, and I didn't- I didn't want him to catch up with you before I did. Get back to the manor as fast as you can. Be very careful. Niklaus will never forgive himself if something happens to you."

"All right. You check the Quarter- pop in at Lafitte's; he might be watching a fight. Bekah's probably with him, wherever he is. I'll check the house. Do you know where Mikael is now?"

"He came in on a ship. I spotted him…down at the wharves." Elijah leans his hand shakily against the side of the hotel for just a moment, breathing through his nose.

"Lijah. Are you all right?" he asks, taking his brother by the elbow and steadying him with his own suddenly-sober arms. "It'll be fine; Nik's too wily to get caught up in Father's net. He'll keep Bekah safe."

Elijah touches his cheek, very softly, just for a moment, and something in his brother's eyes nosedives his stomach even further between his boots, and he would have told you, just a moment ago, it couldn't possibly sink anymore, he's slopped every bit of himself out onto the pavement beneath him because what he said about Nik is certainly true, no eel is so slippery as his paranoid brother with his backup plan for his backup plan, but if Nik did not dissolve into his own tears during that final confrontation, his jabs bruised a bone or two on their way in, and it's not going to be the last thing he ever says to the brother who checked for monsters beneath his bed.

Is it?

You can tell him that at least, right, Elijah? He's spent a very long time trying not to mind that once his brother was not a monster, and he loved him, and perhaps Fate has taken this certainty from him, but it will not send one or the both of them to their deaths with all this ugliness hanging between them.

Elijah?

Haven't you even a bloody  _word_ for him -he just needs- he needs just one little goddamn reassurance to lock his knees, to square his shoulders, to send him forth with a whistle on his lips though there is a storm in his belly. He really didn't mean -Elijah, he wasn't trying to push anyone away, he just- Nik just knew precisely where to  _aim_ , brother, but he didn't mean- Father is shit, not Nik, Elijah, Nik knows that, Nik knows he never lapped up a single crumb of Father's bullshit-  _why are you bloody looking at him like that_ -

"I'm very sorry, Kol."

"What? For what? Did you lie to me? Is Nik- oh my God- Jesus Christ, Elijah-"

"Kol," Tim says softly, touching his shoulder. "Let's get you to the house, all right? You can meet up with him there."

"No no no no- Elijah, why are you sorry?  _Did you lie to me_? Is Nik dead? Did you say that just to get me moving? Are they both-  _what are you fucking sorry for, Elijah_?" he screams, and through this sudden fog in a cotton round his head he realizes Tim has an arm round his waist, that his knees have let go beneath him, that the air he does not need has squeezed itself off from his throat and left him gasping like a bloody fish.

"Shh, it's all right," Tim says, shifting the arm round his waist to heft him back onto his feet. "You're all right, Kol. We'll go and get him, ok? Ok?"

"No; Elijah- don't tell me he's dead, Elijah. I didn't mean what I said to him. He knows that, doesn't he? I was just pissed, Elijah-"

Elijah cups both his cheeks in his hands and pulls his forehead into his chest, to hold him there for a moment as he tremulously gathers the air back into his lungs. "So was he, Kol. And he was fine, last I saw him, earlier this morning. Go find him, make your amends. Leave the city immediately. Nik has plenty of contingency plans in place; he'll take you somewhere safe."

"Without you?"

"For a little while," Elijah says, stepping back and straightening the cuffs of his sleeves, his face very pale.

"What are you going to do?"

"My job. Which is to keep him from this family he has already brought far too much harm to. Tell Niklaus I'll meet you all in England if I don't make it back to the house before you leave. He knows where."

"What if he's already got them?" he whispers, letting himself lean into Tim.

Elijah takes a very long time to adjust his sleeve cuffs once more. "Then run for a very long time, brother."

He vanishes.

Tim's heart beats very loudly against his back, his chin grazing the top of Kol's head. "Fuck. Jaysus- what kind of fucking monster is your da, if you're all afraid of him?"

He peels Tim's hands from his waist and scrapes his legs shakily together beneath him. "I want you to go to St. Stephen's."

"What?"

"If Father's been in town five minutes, he already knows where the house is, that I frequently pop in and out of this hotel, that you might be a bargaining chip for him. So go to the church, put on your best good little Irish Catholic face, make confession, whatever, just keep your hat low and act like a parishioner, and I'll swing round to pick you up once I've got Nik and Bekah. Or-" He falters just a little as he turns round to face the boy. "Or without them."

"Why don't I just come with you?"

"Because he'll either kill you in a flat second, or you'll get to be one of his many pawns. I want you out of the way. Go to the church, get on your knees in the confessional box -you remember how to do that, I know- and wait for me. All right?"

"Jesus." Tim takes off his cap and runs a hand through his hair. "Well, you can't- should you really just go stumbling off with him flitting around somewhere?"

"I'll get through to the house."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes; Nik's paranoid, I'm sneaky. I've managed to tiptoe my way into your heart, haven't I?" he asks, and half-heartedly tweaks the boy's nose.

Tim pulls him into a rushed kiss, both his hands on either of Kol's cheeks.

They separate.

"How long do I have to wait?"

"Forever, darling- isn't that how long I'm worth?" he asks playfully, but his smile hurts when he flashes it.

He cups his hands round the back of Tim's neck and pulls him down for a final bruising peck. "I'll see you in a bit. Be sure to tell the priest all about me, all right?"

* * *

"Nik!" he screams into the unlit house. " _Nik_!"

He flashes up the stairs into the office, the studio, the bedroom he has not shared with his brother for a very long time, circles round to the back balcony, puts his hand to his forehead for just a moment and takes three long breaths, because wasn't there something, underneath the pounding of his pulse, didn't he for just a moment catch that familiar thread that does not quite indicate life but neither does it imply death, wasn't there just a flicker of a heart just as quick as his own, a huff of breath, bloody  _listen_ -

"Nik?" he calls out. "Nik, you little fucking tit-  _Nik_ -"

"You don't have to shout, little brother," his brother says suddenly from the bottom of the stairs.

He hasn't done it in years, and Nik has got both hands clasped behind his back, so what are the chances of a little reciprocation, but relief- it doesn't calculate in any of that, it just skips your feet down three steps at a time and it loops one of your arms round your brother's neck and it pulls him into an embrace that strains both your ribs with a groan and it puts a smile on your face even though there is none on his, it rushes down all round you for so long that you might well as have washed up on some distant shore with the surf going foamy round your ankles, pressing you down flat into the sand until you breathe in enough beach to stove in both your lungs.

Nik takes a shuddery breath against his hair.

"Where's Bekah? Father's in the city; we've got to leave, now."

"I'm well aware of that. I've already sent her on ahead of me."

"So she's safe?"

"Yes. She's safe. Where is Elijah?"

"He'll try and meet us back here. If not, he said to meet him in England- he said you'd know where." He tries to pull away; Nik sets a hand on the back of his head and jerks him back in against his chest. "Nik, I'm having some very warm and squishy feelings right now as well, but we have to go. You can tell me all about how much you missed every hair on my head later."

Nik's voice is very shaky. "Do you know…out of all of them, I never thought it was going to be you. You were the only one I unconditionally trusted. So I guess this shouldn't actually come as any sort of surprise, now should it?"

"What are you blathering about, Nik?"

"I knew you were  _angry_ at me, Kol," he hisses, shoving him out and away to hold him at arms-length so roughly his head snaps back. "But to sic  _Mikael_ on me? To want me to spend my next thousand years dying at his hands because I hurt your little bloody  _feelings_?"

"Why the hell would you even think that, you idiot?" he snaps right back at his brother. "I don't know why the hell he's here, but he tends to do that, if you haven't noticed- catch up with us throughout the centuries? Or did you forget all about fleeing Russia in 1812 and heading off for France with Bekah while Elijah and I went to Greece? It's what we do, Nik. We run, he chases."

"Did you forget, I have an entire network in place here- I have a whole bloody  _fucking_ system set up to inform me of any Mikael-related news nearly before Mikael knows of it himself, and do you know what it told me? That what brought Mikael running this time was my own family. One little brother in particular, who was hurt. Who apparently wanted to pay me back far beyond a few slaughtered minions and a broken painting or two."

"You murdered my own bloody mother and I kept it a secret for 900 bloody years- you think I would just go on and sink the knife into your back because you dinged up my feelings a bit?" He grips Nik by the shirt collar, swallows down the little crack that tries to put itself through to his voice. "Do you have any idea how many times you've hurt my feelings throughout the centuries, Nik?" Nik looks away; he gives him a little shake. " _Nik_."

"Someone saw you do it, Kol," Nik says, but there is no anger in his voice anymore, just a whole lot of fatigue pinching flat the edges.

"They were lying."

"They were  _compelled_ , brother."

"I didn't  _do it_ , Nik. Nik- no matter what you've said or done to me, everything I have ever done has been to annoy you, because how else am I supposed to get noticed, with Bekah and Elijah around? I break your toys, I muddle up your plans- I don't  _betray_ you, Nik."

Nik looks down at the floor, his throat working. "Why?" he asks when he can look back up at last, and if he isn't mistaken there's a bit of shine to Nik's eyes he hasn't seen in a very long time, perhaps not since he stood over Mother with her heart dripping in his hand and he stared for so long at this piece of the woman who slid him from between her thighs and then left him to his father. "I don't want you to lie to me anymore, I just want to know _why_ , Kol. I thought-" He licks his lips, drops his head, shuts his eyes with a breath through his nose. "I thought I had one person I could trust, who would just-" He takes another breath through his nose. "Love me anyway. Bekah always comes crawling back, but you -you, brother- you never even leave in the first place."

He loosens his grip on Nik's collar as his brother lifts his hands to cup his cheeks, so like Elijah's gesture of a mere fifteen minutes ago, his hands just a touch rougher, more callused, his fingers gentler, his head putting itself to that calculating angle of the predator even as his nose scrunches with the sudden effort of staving off his tears. "Do you know why I'm telling you this? Because you're going into a box next to Finn. I probably won't let you out again. I hope your moment of petty little comeuppance was worth it, little brother."

"Nik,  _no_ ," he snaps, and he feels the dagger prick his back.

* * *

He puts up quite the fight, his little brother.

But he triumphs in the end as he always does.

Some men -many men he's known- measure their worth in conquerings such as this, on the one weighing platform their own boot, and on the other a corpse, for where would Napoleon, Genghis, Frederick the Great reside in the annals of history if not for their victories of blood and bone?

But this one-

This one was the brother who loved him, so  _steadily_ , mate.

He sets Kol in his lap and he takes the dagger from the only place he could bear to stick it, through the back and into the heart, and he transfers it to his chest, so that at least this last of his youngest brothers may rest comfortably in his bed of silk and wood, and then he just holds him for a bit.

Elijah finds them like this, his chin on Kol's head, Kol limp in his arms, the house silent all round them, not a settling creak to be heard.

"Niklaus, what have you done?" he asks with that resignation of the continually disappointed.

He presses his cheek to his brother's head, and pushes his free palm into both his eyes, screwing them tightly shut against his hand. "I need another moment with him."

"Father's coming, Niklaus."

"I know." He swallows round the lump in his throat. "Go on and catch up with Bekah. I sent her ahead in one of the cars with a few bodyguards. They'll stop across the river, in Hattiesburg. I'll meet you both there."

"Niklaus-"

"I said I need a bloody  _minute_ with him, Elijah," he snaps.

His brother lingers for a moment longer, and then with the soft hiss of air displaced too quickly, he disappears.

Do you know what his little brother would say?

Piss off, Nik.

He always toed that infinitesimal line between too far and just acceptable, did Kol.

He didn't lie, little brother. That is the advantage to the ears of dead men: in one and out the other, isn't that right?

But he did-

He did think he had someone who would love him in spite of, who never would stray far. He wants to say, Kol- he wants to say it's all right, finding out differently, because to what else has he become accustomed, over the years, but not you, brother.

Not  _you_.

That one hurts quite a very lot.

* * *

**The Other Side, 2013**

She is very pale today, but she has a smile on her face.

Is that for him?

It doesn't matter; he'll give it back anyway.

That's what smiles are for.

"To what do you owe the honor?" he asks, bowing over her hand.

"I was wondering if I could just…sit here for a while. With you," Bonnie Bennett says, and he thinks-

Once a girl who died asked this of him.

He was still nearly human, and he loved her, but there are some not made for this kingdom of monsters, and so when he fed to her the blood she had to guppy in through lips already red with the dark spray of the sword she took to her gut, when she took her last breath and then she sat up in his arms and she screamed until he rocked her into silence, she looked up at him, and she told him no.

Today I end here.

Help me get through it?

Bekah came for him afterward.

They held hands until he could be a man about it again.

Are you leaving him too, Bonnie Bennett?

One, two, three, breathe.

You are already dead, boy.

You died thrice.

It wasn't so bad; you survived; you walked a thousand shores, thundered off a thousand guns, raised the dust of arctic plains, Sahara hills, loved much, let go more, buried what you could not shake off, carried on as all things must-

You know how to shoulder sinking heart, crippled stomach, knotted throat.

But she's got a nice smile.

Not many people do, when they look at him, you know?

"No jokes for me today?" she asks, crossing her arms over her chest.

"What do you want? Something from the naughty side or the Nik? I'll give you a little taste of each. Naughty: What's the difference between a rabbi and a priest?  
A rabbi cuts them off; a priest sucks them off. Nik: What do frogs do with paper? Rip-it!" He lifts both his eyebrows. "Which will it be, darling?"

"Is there a third category? One that's actually funny?" she asks, and she tries to laugh, he sees it bulge in her throat, he watches it ripple through her shoulders, cause a brief wake on her pale sweat-smeared face, touch off a little spark in her eyes, and then she falls down.

He catches her around the waist. "Bonnie?"

Her head falls limply forward against his chest.

" _Bonnie_?"

"Kol," she says, and then she lets out a scream to wake the bloody dead.

* * *

"Why don't you pop round Marcel's first, and let him know that he'll be sharing with us the use of his finest minions. I don't really care what he has to say to that, Elijah. I want an army."

He clicks over to the other line. "Tim? Anything? All right; keep your eyes skinned, mate. I'll be there in no more than an hour. Don't let anyone leave."

He clicks back to the other line. "Elijah? I've changed my mind. Leave the negotiations to me. I've a team at the Monteleone. Head for the hotel; I'll meet you there in an hour. Make sure you roll up those nice sleeves of yours, brother," he says with a grim little smile, and he disconnects the call with a tap of his finger.

"What's going on?" Caroline demands, following him down the stairs he skips two at a time, jacket over his arm.

"Can't talk now, love. I've got some genocide to commit," he replies over his shoulder, and he throws the door wide.

* * *

"Bonnie?" He gives her a jostle, lets her slither down to touch her knees to the grass, follows her to his own knees, takes his hands from her waist to cup her damp cheeks between his palms, hears his heart trip once, stall indefinitely, turn over with a little shudder of all the breath knotted into his throat as she lifts her head, looks him straight in the eye-

"I thought I could keep them out," she says, fumbling her hands up to grip him by the shoulders, to scrunch his shirt in balls beneath her fists, and then she screams again.

* * *

"Klaus,  _wait_!"

He whips round to point his finger at her. "Stay here with Rebekah, Caroline. Don't leave the house."

"No! What the hell do you  _mean_ , you've got some genocide to commit? You don't just drop that and then run out the door!"

He swirls his coat round behind him to slip his arms through the sleeves, and he gives the lapels a firm jerk to settle them neatly across his collarbones as she stands glaring just slightly down at him from the stoop, arms round her middle, curls flattened down her shoulders.

"Please don't just leave," she says quietly.

He takes a step up to put himself eye to eye with her, and he takes one of her flattened curls very tenderly in his hand, running the back of one finger all the way along to its end.

"If the witches really are trying to raise Mikael, we have to stop them. I already put my father precisely where he belongs; I'm not doing it again. Considering how nicely they bent their knees in response to my indiscriminate slaughter of innocents during that parade they thought to use as some sort of demonstration as to how helpless I am in their thrall, I thought another reminder might be in order."

"Who's in the hotel?" she whispers.

He flicks his eyes away from hers, and he licks his lips. "A full guest registry, some locked doors, and a few very hungry vampires."

"Klaus-"

"I will work my way through every single shop, residence, sordid little alleyway in this town, if I have to. Until they've decided they've had enough, that it's time to come out and face me personally. It's us or them, Caroline."

"Ok, but you can't just walk around  _murdering_ the whole city! You can only compel the media and the police so far. You don't think someone's going to notice something, when an entire freaking  _city_ shows up dead? I know you think you are completely unbeatable, and invulnerable, but some of us are not, and we would kind of like to keep this whole supernatural freak show thing on the down low, if you don't mind, and I'm sorry, but I have not been around long enough to stand here and not even bat one single teeny little lash at the thought of you going all… _Ripper Stefan_ on like a gajillion-"

"Caroline."

" _What_?"

"Stay here. You'll be all right. I'll be back in a little while."

He turns, stops, looks down at his feet for a moment, lifts his eyes slowly up to hers, closes the distance between them with one awkwardly hesitant step.

He fumbles it a bit, this kiss.

It is not a thing of sweaty bed sheets, stained innocence, sated hormones, after all.

He is still not quite sure where to place his hand when she curls her own round his necklaces and she stands on her tiptoes to lean herself into him like they're a single entity, like she bloody wants them to be, like his touch is not something to be shunned but courted, her mouth having at him with such force he nearly stumbles backward off the step.

"I'll be back," he says against her forehead, and then he blurs away into the rain.

* * *

"Take a breath, Bonnie."

"I  _can't_ \- it  _hurts_ -"

"Shh shh shh; do it anyway. Take a nice deep one. All right? In through your nose; there we are." He brushes his hands down her neck, and he steadies them against her shoulders. "Take another one," he coaxes, reaching up to gently stroke a strand of bang from her eye, to secure it behind her ear, to softly draw his thumb from lobe to jaw line.

She inhales a breath that is nearly a sob.

Shh; shh.

Just lie here, darling, he said to that girl who died black and flaking with his blood on her lips.

It's all right.

It won't hurt forever.

That's what you say, when you love someone.

It's how you tell a lie that is not wicked.

You hold them in your arms, and you smile, and you tell this lie not for them but for yourself, and they bubble up a few final breaths, they stretch a smile painted red and they go peacefully to their six feet of moist black earthworms because you will dust off their ashes and carry on about your life, but Bonnie-

He doesn't have one anymore.

Remember?

Remember he died alone on a cold floor, one minute before his brother burst in through the door; remember Bekah shed a tear, Elijah blinked for just a moment, remember he tried so  _hard_ to square his shoulders, to bear this with a smile, remember he buried his face in your shoulder one night and he let himself be a child about this just until you stirred and you began to open your eyes-

What he's saying-

What he means is-

Thank you for keeping him company.

But don't stop now.

Please.

She tips her face back from his chest, and he leans himself down to meet her forehead to forehead, taking his thumb in another soft line from lobe to jaw line.

"There are witches, a lot of them, trying to draw on my powers."

He keeps his eyes half-shuttered, his lips half an inch from her own. "To bring you back?"

"No," she chokes out, and another jolt cramps her, draws her upward, bumps her nose against his own. "They don't want me. They want Mikael. A Bennett witch has to drop the veil. I guess they couldn't find anybody else." She lets out a breath against his mouth, sinks forward a little more against him, clamps her hand round the retch that surges from belly to lips.

"Tell them to piss off."

A damp laugh wrenches open her lips. "I'm trying."

"What do you need me to do?" he asks, trailing his thumbs beneath her eyes. "I told you I'm not letting Nik come over here; I just got rid of him."

"I think," she starts, and a heave, a breath, a squeeze of her eyes and she stabilizes against him, the hand still balled up in his shirt relaxing just a touch against his shoulder. "I think I can draw on the power they're channeling through me and use it to…seal off the veil from this side. So he can't get through."

"All right; then do it."

She opens her eyes.

She keeps her forehead against his own. "You can't see them anymore, if I do that. You won't be able to cross over. They'll be gone, Kol."

* * *

The sky breaks itself open above his head.

The street unfurls itself in slick black carnival reflections before him.

His breath disperses in a fine white mist.

His boots ricochet themselves off the pavement with a rattle to shame the rain.

"Elijah," he says. "I can smell your cologne from a block away, brother. There's no need to creep about behind me, fretting over how I'll react to the fact that for some reason you've gone and completely defied my orders instead of waiting for me at the Monteleone, as I asked. But I'm sure you've good reason for it. So let's hear it, hmm?" he calls back over his shoulder, holding his hands out to either side.

"My apologies for this, Niklaus," Elijah says right in his ear, and then his brother's rough palms press themselves to either cheek, and he knows nothing more.

* * *

He unearths Niklaus' phone from his jacket pocket.

"Timothy?" he says into it.

"Niklaus is indisposed at the moment. But he wanted me to communicate to you a change in plans. Do not harm the humans. Wait for further instructions. Either Niklaus or myself will be in touch."

He hangs up.

He slips Niklaus' phone into his own jacket and adjusts his sleeves.

The sky leaks itself into his brother's sightlessly staring eyes.

* * *

They stare at one another for a very long moment.

Life goes like this.

You did not ink your finger to the contract when mother pushed you out between thighs sticky with blood and sweat and afterbirth, but there is writ in stone a pact by which all man must abide, and it ends here.

It's only a story, after all.

There once was a boy called Kol.

He does not remember it, but he was born, and he signed in blood this contract of man, and then like all other boys, he lived for a while, raised a bit of hell, mashed his joys and his disappointments into the same bittersweet unguent, and then he laid down his head, and he shut his eyes one final time.

You might recognize this story.

You will try to say yours is different.

You will try to tell it a different way.

You will stamp into your heart the firm conviction that your generation has pressed upon this planet that has murdered dinosaurs, frozen continents, boiled oceans its indelible mark, and you will say to yourself, but what would become of all that  _space_ , because how much of it you span, you couldn't possibly get your arms round it, this shape wedged into the hearts of friend, family, foe, inked in the immortal print of man, stitched onto that tapestry of history where hangs your bright little star, right there, nestled among the towers of monarchs and the pyramids of pharaohs.

But you are meant to be softened.

You should not always be a sharp edge, prickling away at the chests of brothers.

900 years, 3 deaths.

It's time for him to bid you all adieu, isn't it?

He takes a deep breath, and she rises with him when he does it, loosens her grip just a touch on his shoulders, smiles with such resignation he knows that she looks into the futures of her friends, and she sees them with a whole narrative unraveled before them, barely the first fresh page touched, and she'll regret it, because eighteen is selfish, it wants another chance, it needs a second go, but life goes like this.

It's only a story.

"Do it."

He spends a lot of time, ironing out his voice before he says it.

"Do you want to say good-bye?" she whispers.

"Oh, I don't think there's time for that," his father says from behind him.

* * *

"Ok, I cannot just sit around here waiting for your brother to murder his psycho way through the entire town."

"Oh, he's my brother now, is he?" Rebekah leans back against the couch and crosses her legs.

"Yes! When he's acting like this, he's your brother, and you bear all responsibility for him, I never touched him, in fact we're probably practically strangers who definitely did not defile Elijah's study and sort of kind of probably traumatize him in the process despite the fact that he's probably seen, like, a  _bajillion_ freakier positions than that, because I'm sure Klaus worked his way through the entire Kama Sutra with every single member of every past performance of Cirque de Soleil or whatever-"

"You're like a bloody faucet! Shut it off," Rebekah snaps.

"Sorry! I babble when I get nervous, ok? I think that's kind of a normal reaction when your dad might just possibly be on his way here now to end us all and  _your brother_ is running around sacrificing humans at the altar of creepy and Stefan is still out there somewhere because he and his hair need a moment alone to brood prettily and are therefore too busy to answer any of my texts!"

"Someone's ignoring you? Well who could have predicted this plot twist?"

"Shut up! Be helpful for once, ok? Tell me…tell me it's going to be ok. Tell me this is going to pass, and we're all going to come through it, because I spend so much time telling myself that, I spend  _so much_ of my life just taking a deep breath and getting through something, and I just need- I need someone else to step in for once, and do this for me, because sometimes it's just…it's so  _hard_."

Rebekah is quiet for a very long time.

She uncrosses her legs.

She leans forward with a sigh. "Get your jacket; we're going to look for Stefan. You're too twitchy shut up in here."

"No- I'll go by myself. Sophie's still here, and I would appreciate it if someone would stick around to make sure nobody sneaks in to stake her while the boys are off playing with their pants around their ankles and their measuring tapes in hand."

"How do you know I won't do it myself?"

"Because there is way too much testosterone in this house. And because then who would you have to pick apart for their fashion choices? Elijah just wears a suit every day, and Klaus wears the same Henley and jeans combination and those kind of douchey hipster necklaces."

"Don't tell him that. He thinks the necklaces may him look 'edgy' or artistic or something idiotic like that. Plus he thinks it's funny to wear a cross."

"Well, don't tell him I said this, but they're kind of stupid. But they do make a nice handhold."

"Oh, let's see- reference number 1800 to sleeping with my brother. I think that alone entails the long and drawn-out demise of poor, helpless Sophie."

Caroline holds out her hand.

Rebekah picks up her jacket from the couch arm and flicks it across the room.

She flashes into it, and flips her curls out over the collar.

"Stefan and I will be back. Miss me already?"

"Like the dagger Nik sticks in my heart every third Sunday or so."

"If Klaus for some reason gets back before me and throws a hissy fit over me being gone, tell him I said to bite me. He doesn't get to tell me what to do. I was Miss Mystic Falls."

"You know you can't still try and use that as a reason to boss him around 150 years from now."

"Watch me," she says, and she yanks the front door open to take one long breath of rain-scented sky, and she edges her foot out onto the front step.

"Caroline."

She looks back over her shoulder.

"Be careful," Rebekah says softly, and then she lifts her chin haughtily and she cocks one hip, and she crosses both arms over her chest. "I'm saying that for Nik's sake, not mine."

"Right."

There is a tiny hitch in her chest, a compression of her heart, a brief throttling of her throat. "Should I just go ahead and schedule the bi-monthly bestie facials when I get back, then?"

"Get out, or I'm eating you."

* * *

He stands up very slowly, keeping himself between Bonnie and his father.

Mikael has got his usual shitty little smile on his face.

"You don't want to trap yourself over here with me, Kol. Not if you ruin this. I'm only trying to reunite you with your brother- isn't that what you want? You always did cling to his leg like a kicked dog. Niklaus brings that out in people."

He hears Bonnie fumble herself awkwardly to her feet, rustle backward a step, take one unsteady breath, curl her fingers into tremulous fists, scuff her shoes uncertainly about in these bright green blades.

His heart, surging in his ears.

The subtler snare of Father's own.

The whisper of the leaves kicking themselves into a round of chatter among silent white limbs.

"Go on," he says casually. "Make a run for it. I can hold him off."

Mikael smiles again.

It's very like Nik's, sometimes, this smile.

Bonnie turns.

He puts himself in Father's path with his own shitty little smile, and out flashes his hand to take his old man by the chest, to plunge his fingers deep enough to scrape, and then there comes the crack of twigs splintering underfoot and a blast of white to smudge the faultless sky, and he takes a knee in the grass, his wrist hanging by a thread.

Mikael steps over him.

He gets his good hand round his father's ankle, and he jerks.

It puts the old man into a tree twenty feet away, and he doesn't like to stretch his tales of course (pecker like an elephant trunk), so he understands that it was not his mere strength of arm that tossed the old bastard like a doll into a trunk that sheers off with the force of this impact, that this sudden cyclone which whips into his eyes bits of leaf and blade and twig perhaps had a thing or two to do with it, that Bonnie has bought him just a moment to gather his legs beneath him and to cradle his wrist forgotten against his chest and to snap from the branches nearest him an improvised stake, splintered round the end.

He twirls it as he advances.

He breaks Father's arm, his collarbone, leaves in place of his temple moist red sponge, grinds the old man's kneecap to powder.

"Kol!" Bonnie shouts, and then Mikael has him by the throat, and round him carousels sky, ground, forest, what is it about death that hurts so bloody  _bad_ , he wants to know, and then he slides down the tree against which he has landed, stake still in his hand, and he spits up blood and teeth.

Mikael cocks his head, and puts himself back together with a brief shudder that clicks into place everything he has dislodged.

His feet slip beneath him, he butter fingers the stake, he fumbles around with one hand to the ground, both eyes on his father, everything sloshing about inside him, bile in his throat, blood in his ears, anxiety in his palms-

Father boots him in the chin.

He rolls with it, tucks himself into a neat little back somersault that puts him once more on his feet, kicks off the tree behind him to bury a hook shot into Father's face that sprays his nose across the grass.

Bonnie looms up like some sort of divine goddess, hair in a rage, the trees and the grass and father himself all bending themselves in helpless devotion, the latter screaming, the branches all round him in a chorus to nearly match these animal cries, and now she whips something through the eye of this storm to find his hand, and he comes up holding the stake he left behind, splintered end first.

He reverses it with a deft toss.

He drives its tip through Mikael's chest so hard it splits both man and branch down the middle.

It's quite slow, the climax of moments such as these.

Mikael falls for a very long time.

He bounces once when he hits the grass.

The leaves and the branches and the grass all carry on their sibilant jabber for several elongated moments, and then slowly the wind sucks itself away like a tide tonguing itself a new line in the sand, very gradual increments of retreat, and he flicks his eyes up to Bonnie, to watch her standing with feet planted, hair settling, shoulders heaving.

She sways.

He clamps his hand round her elbow, but she shakes him off, and she stands alone, and what a jolt of pride he gets, all the way down to his guts.

"How long will he be out?" she asks shakily.

"Not very long. You shake death off pretty quickly, when you're already dead. Gilbert always comes back in about thirty seconds. I counted once." He gives her a little push. "Run. He's down; I can take care of him. Thank you, though, Sir Bonnie, for helping out a damsel in distress. You can collect your kiss later. And maybe a little something extra, for your troubles. It was quite a nasty dragon, wasn't it?"

"Kol-"

"I'm not kidding around now, Bennett," he interrupts her solemnly. "Leave. Do whatever you can."

"And if I'm wrong? If I can't channel the witches, if I can't do anything?"

"Then I'll sit here for a thousand years, and I'll kill him as many times as I have to."

He smiles.

His story ended a year ago, or perhaps three hours ago, he never can tell over here, and no one much cares about the epilogue anyway.

The important thing is he died, his family didn't, and if there are no happy endings, there are happy long enoughs.

Nik, Bekah, 'Lijah-

Always remember to ask yourselves, what would Kol do?

The answer, of course, is shag it out.

Remember that.

He had a memoir written about him, after all.

"Kol-"

"Get out of here, Bonnie."

She lingers for another moment. "I'm going to come back."

He smiles again.

A lot of people have said that to him.

Do you know what comes back for him?

Time.

That's it.

"All right," he says, and he keeps the crack from his voice with 900 years of practice.

She can't run as fast as him, of course; no one can.

But it doesn't really seem like that, now does it, when there's a back put to you and footsteps sprinting not toward but away?

He watches her through the trees until even the very sharp lens of his supernatural eyes can no longer bring her into focus, and then with hardly a sound, Mikael sits up, and stabs him through the stomach.

* * *

"Elijah, what the hell have you done?" she demands as he strides in through the front door with Nik draped bloody princess style in his arms, neck flopping awkwardly, eyes open eerily.

"Niklaus and I differ slightly on how this situation with the witches needs to be handled," he says mildly, and sets Nik down on the sofa.

"He's going to kill you when he wakes up, you realize that, don't you? Finn's 900 years in his coffin will look positively humane, next to what Nik's going to inflict on you."

"Where's Caroline?" Elijah asks, removing his jacket.

"She went to go find Stefan."

Elijah carefully turns up the sleeves of his dress shirt. "Well, then, he'll have another direction to aim his tantrum, won't he, sister?" he points out, loosening the tie at his throat.

Nik's foot twitches.

His lashes float down to touch the moons of fatigue beneath his eyes.

His chest jumps with the force of the inhale that shoots him upright against the cushions.

* * *

"Here's what's going to happen,  _boy_ ," Mikael hisses in his ear, pinning his face to the flat white bark of the tree in front of him, stake still in his stomach, his fingernails scrabbling for purchase against this smooth silk trunk, not a bloody knot to be found, the branches just out of reach, the leaves still tremulously protesting the blow his sternum has dealt to their base, his right hand in pieces between trunk and torso, his nose crushed flat against the wood, one of his legs dead beneath him, his stomach still piteously seeping. "I will kill every single one of them, starting with Niklaus. When it's done, I'll take myself with them, so I can join you all over here, and I will spend all of eternity ensuring that when you see that little coward, it's only to watch him scream and cry, and die, over and over again. You will not slobber after him like a puppy; there will be nothing left of him to weep over. He'll spend his death in pieces. And if you try to seek solace in the arms of the rest of this family, they will suffer the same fate. And the witch. You like her, do you?" Mikael presses him even harder into the tree, the stake forcing itself deeper, a little trickle making its way from his lips to his chin, his throat conjuring up only phlegm in the place of protest. "Do you think she can hide from me forever?"

He slides his hand down between himself and the tree, and wraps his fingers round the very edge of the stake.

"She'll hate you, by the time I'm through with her. She'll spend every waking moment understanding that every cut I make, every tear, every break- that's all courtesy of Kol Mikaelson's love. This family is a plague, boy."

He coughs a clot onto the bark.

He flexes his fingers round the stake.

"You were the worst of them, after Niklaus. That's what you get, for modeling yourself after that little coward."

Father cracks his head so hard against the tree his knees loosen and fold beneath him.

He spits another little stream down onto his chin.

There is another crack, a great wash of white before his eyes, the black pinwheels of consciousness on the verge of retreat, ringing in his ears, another surge in his mouth, more bitter metal wetness down his chin-

Mikael breaks his spine like a piece of candy.

He screams.

His hand slips uselessly from the stake, dangles numbly down his side, joins the rest of him in an awkward accordion pleat on the ground.

"Do you want to see how much the witch likes you?" Mikael asks, and picks him up by the scruff of the neck.

* * *

Elijah takes Nik by the throat and pins him back down against the couch, unwinds his tie one-handed, tosses it toward the chair where he has draped his jacket.

"What the  _hell_ do you think you're doing-"

"I told you to exercise some common sense and subtlety in regards to your little war here, Niklaus. You'll perhaps be surprised to know that doesn't include slaughtering the entire city."

"Get  _off_ me," Nik snarls, and then they are at one another like bloody dogs.

* * *

"Come out, come out, Bonnie Bennett."

He feels one of his vertebrae re-link itself with an excruciating snap, the subsequent twitch of life stirring down the dead meat of his right leg to touch his foot, electricity in his belly, static round his waist, all of this white noise below his belt beginning to reset as his spine corrects itself disc by agonizing disc-

"He can't die, of course. But he can feel a lot of pain, for a very long time."

The trees do not stir.

"I know you aren't blessed with the hearing of my children, so I'll turn it up a notch," Mikael calls, and then he pauses for just a moment, and he kicks a hole through three of his ribs.

The cry he muffles into the grass is very red.

He tongues a tooth from its spurting socket down onto the ground.

"Nothing?"

Father bends his arm until the back of his hand touches his shoulder.

He buries his face in the grass and he breathes in through his nose, one, two, three, you know what to do, boy, let out a laugh, give us a smile, haven't you a quip-

"You see what else you've picked up from Niklaus, then," Mikael says, and he smiles just a little as he bends that arm further still. "Nobody cares."

There is the squelch of Mikael's fingers probing round his kidney, the white-hot charge of this into his belly, up his throat, the rattling of his breath in his nostrils, the chafing of it inside his throat, fingernails in his palm, teeth in his lip-

He throws up into the grass.

Father stomps the ball of his shoulder.

* * *

"Both of you  _stop it_!" she shrieks, blurring after them up the stairs as they ricochet off walls, put themselves through staircase banisters, lock themselves nearly chest to chest, Nik's arm swinging, Elijah's leg buckling, Nik's blood in a smear across Elijah's knuckles, Elijah's in a spatter through Nik's beard. "I spent four bloody days with the renovators after the witches launched their little assault on this place!  _Nik_! I said  _stop it_ , you idiot!"

She throws a vase at Nik's head.

It knocks him upside the temple, reels him back into the wall, exposes for Elijah an opening he uses to shoulder their brother over the side of the railing.

Nik lands with a crunch on his shoulder, rolls himself just barely out of reach of Elijah's flawless Ferragamos as he swings himself over the banister and he lands two inches shy of Nik's stupid prat head, kips himself back up onto his feet, whips his elbow round into Elijah's jaw with the noisy crack of something giving way inside the mouth of their eldest brother.

Elijah spits a tooth onto the floor, and smears away the trickle of blood down his chin before it can reach his shirt.

He backhands Nik across the face.

* * *

" _Stop it_ ," Bonnie says, but she does it from her knees.

Mikael lifts him up a little higher.

He doesn't see her fall -bit of a veil over his eyes; head wounds bleed like the stumps of fallen soldiers- but he hears her carefully step from behind wherever she has stashed herself and he listens to the impact of each knee in the grass and there's a hand round this demand she makes to his father, very strangled, and where before the trees chattered themselves like old biddies passing round their gossip like teacakes, he now hears only the hesitant murmuring of leaves not yet committed to the tempest.

"It's too late anyway," she tells them, looking up through her hair, blood round her nose and in little bubbles on her lips. "It's done."

He feels a little jab, separate from the phantom prods of his father rooting round his organs.

Nik.

Don't forget him.

He knows he said differently mere minutes/days/seconds ago, but he's done something rather unselfish here, and wouldn't it be nice of you to throw him a crumb every so often, to recall you had a brother Kol, he was sometimes not as bad as he seemed, he loved his family till the end.

He did.

He does.

He will.

Burn a candle for him every so often, will you, big brother?

"Too late?" his father asks, hauling him up onto his feet and thrusting him round in front. "That's very unfortunate for my son. I think you better undo it," he says calmly, and then Mikael presses his hand into the battered end of this stake still hung up in his guts until he goes screaming to his knees with a belly full of fire.

* * *

Elijah walks him almost nonchalantly into the wall of the parlor where they have backed themselves in a blur of teeth and fists and feet.

Nik's head impacts the plaster noisily.

He hacks a wet red cough all over the wallpaper.

Elijah holds him on his feet by the collar of his shirt.

"Niklaus," he says, and it's not often there is a waver in the voice of this backbone of the Mikaelsons, but she hears one now, and for just a moment she remembers a very white night, the snow falling on Moscow very softly, putting on their manor the finishing touches of a ceremonial cake, this same crack running through Elijah's voice as he told her of all the things Mikael did, and the ones he didn't.

"There is a different way to accomplish this, brother. You don't have to face Father alone. Not this time, Niklaus."

Nik is very still, hanging in Elijah's hand like a child.

"I've heard that before, Elijah," he says roughly.

"I know you have. But it's time for it to mean something, Niklaus. Rebekah?" He cranes his head round to look at her.

"I don't want to run from him anymore, Elijah," she whispers. "I wanted a life, not a handful of moments between sprinting."

"We're not going to run, sister. We will face him together. We are down to three; it's time for the Mikaelsons to present a united front. Father has pursued us when we are at our most vulnerable, at odds with one another, scattered about the world. This time we meet him head to head."

She looks between them both. "Nik?"

He wipes the blood from his mouth.

He looks down at his feet.

"Elijah, I don't- I can't-"

"I won't leave you this time, Nik," she tells him very quietly. "I'm here to stay. Even if you intend to keep that annoying blonde twit around for the rest of your life. I'm going to stay," she says, and a breath squares her shoulders and lifts her chin, and she offers up a very tremulous smile, just on the verge of breaking, but it's a start, Nik.

Don't let her down?

He looks up at her from beneath his brows. "You'll change your mind, Bekah. You always change your mind."

"Then give me a reason not to, Nik."

* * *

" _Stop_!" Bonnie yells, and through this thin sliver of sight he has cracked open beneath the mess of half his bloody head in a red paste down his forehead and over his lids, he sees the trees jump to do her bidding, the strands of her bangs take flight, the shirt about her shoulders whip itself to whitecaps.

She hunches forward, vomits up a gout of blood to match the puddle beneath his own hands, stretches her arms out with puppet awkwardness, dangles like this with her head down, her hands out, the storm roaring round her, the grass rustling beneath his cheek, branches clattering amongst themselves, sky impervious, Father more so-

"Step forth, and take the hands of the Bennett witch, Mikael," Bonnie says mechanically.

Mikael twists the stake again.

He lets go.

He leans down to loop his hands round Bonnie's wrists, to bring her almost gently to her feet, to thread his fingers through her own.

"Surge et egredere de morte."

The trees bend themselves nearly double.

The grass uproots itself in a bright cyclone.

He yanks the stake from his guts with a little cry.

"Et spiritum fovere."

He spits another mouthful of blood into the grass.

"Nobis cor tuum."

He fumbles his feet up underneath him.

"Surge et egredere de morte."

A head makes a very interesting sound, when it separates from the spinal column.

It's quite indescribable, actually.

Try it for yourself sometime.

Mikael crumples, but Bonnie clutches him still, folding down with him, her lips moving restlessly, the wind howling ceaselessly, his hair whipping him round the eyes, his jacket buffeting his ribs, his shout springing from his lips to carry itself off over her head. "Bonnie, let go of him!  _Bonnie_!  _Let go_!"

He pitches Father's head into the woods.

"I  _can't_! Et spiritum fovere; Nobis cor tuum; Surge et egredere de morte; Surge et egredere de morte; et spiritum fovere; nobis cor tuum; surgeetegrederedemorteetspiritumfoverenobiscortuumsurgeetegrederedemorte-"

He breaks each of her fingers at the knuckle.

She screams.

There is a final surge of this breath from the bellies of spells, unearthing from the grass the long roots of these flawless white trees, their trunks echoing off one another, the branches tangling in Domino collisions, the leaves adding themselves to the featureless blue sky like one of Nik's less structured paintings, a spot here, a flurry there-

He wraps her in his arms.

He takes a glancing blow to the shoulder, a more direct one to the ribs, spies his opening, flashes them both toward it with the woods coming undone all around them, Mikael's corpse vanishing in a snow drift of trunks, his eyes veiling themselves in the pale milk of the blind as they fill with the grit of trees torn to confetti, Bonnie's hands hooked to claws against his collar-

He ducks a tree, sidesteps a branch, hurls them both beyond the eye of this slowly settling storm.

The wood gives another lurch, adds to Mikael's pyre another two crosspieces, conjures up one last mushroom cloud of leaves stripped from their nests-

Bonnie winds his collar tight enough to choke-

He bends down to set his cheek to her hair-

And against his chest she coughs up another gout of blood, and then the wind twists itself from the deformed limbs of the trees and peels itself back from the disheveled roots of the grass and she slumps limply forward, leaning all her weight against him.

He holds her there for a moment, his cheek still pressed to her head, one hand lifting to gently touch the hair down her back.

She disentangles her fingers slowly from his collar.

He lets her pull back from his chest.

"You all right?" he asks.

"I'm ok," she says, and she gives him a smile that is just a little crooked, and lifts one hand to wipe the blood from her nose.

"How are the fingers?" he asks, and raises one hand to his lips, to kiss the very tips.

"Looks like they're fine."

"Yes; I have very magical lips. I'll show you some more tricks later."

She has no return quip, just a bit of a smile, a very little thing, quite odd, but she's got quite the crowd in her pretty little head, and Mikael wrung from her the strength of ten gods (Kols), and so he won't follow this up with any commentary on her lack of protest, he will brush the hair very tenderly from her eyes, he will return her smile with one of his own, and perhaps after this is over, he'll sit three branches above her in one of their favorite trees, and he'll tell her about this family-sized hole in his chest, and he'll let her do with it what she will, because sometimes he gets very tired, you know, he does not want to make believe, and if at any point there is a moment to take off the gloves, to throw down the mask, it must be here, where all things end.

"It'll take Father a while to dig himself out of all that, without a head. Can you still do it? Can you seal off the veil?"

"Yes," she says.

"I'll be right here. You'll be all right. Just do it quickly, darling."

"Kol," she says.

"There's a prize for it, afterward, but you're being timed, so better hurry it along." He taps his wrist. "Bonus points for witty puns about magic. Nik would probably say something like, "Magicians assistants are highly sawed after." It has to be worse than that. Come on, darling- make me vomit."

"I can send you back."

He's still holding her hand, and of course he noticed that, he notices every little brush, whether meaningful or less, but suddenly the warmth of it goes numb in his fingers, he is holding a block, he has swallowed another, there is a sudden give in his chest, another stab in his belly.

"Before I close off the veil on this side. You can go home. I can send you back instead of Mikael. They wanted an original vampire, didn't they?" She shrugs nonchalantly, she gives him her crooked smile, she steps back out of his reach.

"And you would come too?" he asks, and it's not a very good question, he's already got the answer to it, a bit of pressure in his heart, a rather tight grip round his throat, and he sees that she wishes he hadn't asked it, but he had to be sure, didn't he?

This is not a love story.

He just wanted to check.

"I can't seal off this side of the veil from the other side of it."

He buries both his hands in the pockets of his trousers. "So you'll stay here. To protect your friends."

She smiles again.

She doesn't let herself cry.

"It's what I do."

Neatly done, witch.

Save your friends, wrest this thorn from your side. Quite a flock of birds, with one stone.

Was it his- didn't he- did you not-

He doesn't want to know.

He won't make a joke about good-bye kisses.

Not now.

Not when he is so raw.

But he does smile.

It's what he's always been good at.

"Can you send me back with a fully rotational head, or anything like that? I want to see the look on Nik's face when I pop in through the door and I twist it round with one of those maniacal, moustache-twirling laughs. I think it'd do a lot for any remaining childhood fears of the dark that might still be lingering."

She laughs.

It's a very unsteady thing, but she gets it out anyway, and isn't that the point?

"I'll see what I can do."

She has not lost her smile, but it does slip a little.

One, two, three, you know what to do, boy.

He puts out his hands.

* * *

Nik is staring at her.

It's a very long moment, and then a thump from round the front of the house ruins it with a blink, and Elijah releases Nik's shirt to let him take a step forward, across the glossy parlor. "What was that?"

"Caroline back with Stefan in tow, I'm sure."

"And who let her leave?" he snaps. "I told you both to stay put."

"Yes, she actually had a few choice words about that. Apparently she doesn't like it when you boss her around. You could have picked a quieter one, Nik. Did you know she-"

"It's not Caroline," he interrupts. "She was wearing perfume today. I don't smell it."

"Maybe the rain washed it off."

"It's not her," he repeats, and something presses itself very small inside her, just as it did when she was very little, the shadows very large, and Nik had to sit beside her bed with a candle and a kind word, holding at bay the shades of monsters with his funny faces.

She hears another thump.

The sudden surge of Nik's heart, the answering swell of her own, the touch of tremor in Elijah's exhalation.

The front door splinters.

She listens to it clatter in pieces against the floor.

Nik steps forward.

She edges up to his shoulder; Elijah places himself at the other.

"Now who the hell would dare," Nik says with just that hint of a smirk in his voice, his shoulder a little unsteady against her own, and in one solid line, they go forth to face their father.

* * *

You can tell what he picked up from Nik.

The way he walks, for instance, with his hands out to either side, that little smirk which she has always wanted to wipe away like a bit of dirt with the crack of her palm, such a bloody blasé smugness to him, like the whole world ought to scrape about his feet with their tongues to his toes.

Beside her, Nik takes a breath, and he does not breathe again.

"Oh my God," she whispers.

Kol smiles up at them from the base of the stairs.

"Greetings, family."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Oh, hey- did I say I had no intention of bringing Kol back? WELL LOOKEE HERE SOMEONE'S PANTS ARE ON FIRE. I have been waiting for this moment for soooo long.
> 
> I do not know whether my version of the other side, nor the magic used by Bonnie, matches up with the current mythology, and frankly, I don't give a shit, because the show is confusing as fuck and contradicts itself every third scene anyway and I've decided everything can just kiss my ass, because, guys, Klaus just had a baby and cried like a little girl through the whole thing. HOW ABOUT NO. We do things my way.
> 
> I don't know what happened with Tim. He and Kol were both lonely, they struck up this nice little bromance, and then all of a sudden they were doing it. How this will play out in present day, with Kol back and Tim hanging around the original family once more, I've no idea. It was nearly 100 years ago that they were involved, after all, and Kol's going to need time to recover from Bonnie, but it will certainly be acknowledged and dealt with in one way or another. And I don't mean in a Julie Plec sort of 'of course we wouldn't have thrown a line in there like that if we didn't mean to follow through with it here have some three second sex against a tree WHAT'S YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM THEY DID IT DIDN'T THEY' way.
> 
> In the next one-shot: another crossover, a Rebekah-centric flashback, probably an unhealthy amount of murder, Caroline sassing the pants off everyone, Klefan bonding, and of course lots of 'der-herp I love my wife' from Klaus.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Well, I'm guessing you guys probably have a good idea of who the crossover character is going to be. Klaus and I are going to enjoy this so much. *Heavy breathing*
> 
> All bad jokes are sadly the property of various pun websites. I really need to up my pun game if I'm going to keep writing this dimply nutjob.
> 
> Lots more Kol and flashback to come in the second part of this, not to mention a pretty big plot point, and Damon wishing he'd never even set eyes on Caroline Forbes.
> 
> Also, I SORT OF ACCIDENTALLY MADE MYSELF SHIP KENNETT? CAN YOU HELP?
> 
> Edited to add: Remember that this series actually goes AU after episode 4x19, so Jeremy is indeed dead, since the show resurrected him in the finale, and I never chose to make that a part of the narrative.


End file.
